Could it be that this song title was the composer’s life
motto? Alton Howard might have had plenty of scenes playing thorough his memory,
or maybe one that was ongoing that spoke to him as he wrote out the words to “There’s
a Rainbow in the Clouds” in 1973. He’d already launched a number of ventures by
the time he was 48 years old, so those who knew him could readily aver that
Alton was courageous, perhaps because he’d found out something along the way:
there’s a way to see through troubles. This perspective no doubt must have
informed him during times of failure and self-criticism that the final chapter
had already been written – with a happy ending. It was a conclusion that he
need not try to generate himself, but he must have known as a businessman that
it was something in which he needed to invest.
Alton Howard was a native Louisianan who lived almost his
whole life and died there, yet looking at the scope of his life, one could not
mistake him for a play-it-safe fellow who was afraid to roam far from security
and home. He and his siblings learned to love music under the tutelage of
parents who sent the family to singing schools in the summers of his youth. Shortly thereafter he attended another very different
kind of school -- his service during World War II in France and Germany in the
U.S. Air Force. After the war, he, along with one brother, began a long series
of business endeavors that endured for the rest of his life. While many of these
efforts were successful, there were probably some down moments, too. At his
death in 2006, his son admitted that indeed his dad had had more than one
failure. But, given the wide variety of his entrepreneurship, Alton was never
one to be downcast over one or even multiple disappointments. As his song ‘There’s
a Rainbow…’ must have informed him, there was always something to gird his
spirit. Besides his secular businesses, Alton Howard was adventurous in the
scope of his Christian faith. He reached out through a church in West Monroe
that he and others established and helped guide for four decades, and he also
helped set up a Christian youth camp and “World Radio” to broadcast the Christian
message. And, of course, there was Howard Publishing and his personal
songwriting efforts. What was he seeing in 1973, so that in all three verses of
his ‘Rainbow’ song he mentions some kind of trouble? His mother had died in
1971, and maybe the health of his aging father (who died in 1974) was on his
mind. We’re all mortal. Or, was it a tumbling business or one of the parachurch
activities that had a bad bug? No matter, for Alton had an anchor.
It might have been an anchor, but it wasn’t deep in the
water, but high above, where Howard was gazing apparently. Alton must have been
like Peter at times, stepping out and trying to walk where less spirited folk
could only worry about getting wet or drowning. He got soaked sometimes, too,
so was there a part of him that actually liked the danger and the water? I’ll
have to see, when I ask him up there near that rainbow, someday.
See following links for information on the composer:
See also “Our Garden of Song”, edited by Gene C. Finley,
Howard Publishing Company, West Monroe, Louisiana, 1980.
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