God's Family -- Lanny Wolfe

 

He was just 35 years old, but had grown enough to appreciate deep down the people whose paths he’d crossed, folks he called ‘family’. Some things like a unique odor, or a visual reminder, or a certain sound in a song, perhaps anything that touches one of our five senses (taste and touch are the other two) can spur memories like Lanny Wolfe encountered one Wednesday night in Jackson, Mississippi. Did the speaker to whom Lanny and others were listening know his words had prompted a song to emerge from Lanny’s spirit about “God’s Family”? This fellow was a missionary, and his stories captivated his listeners, so that a songwriter like Lanny Wolfe goes where he senses the Spirit wants him to go – musically, poetically. Songwriters have the intuition to have scrap paper handy, and to capture a moment, and not just one moment, but countless others that present themselves in the mind. That kinda sums up Lanny’s ‘family’ episode one Wednesday night.

 

By the time in his life when he was in Mississippi in the mid-1970s, Lanny Wolfe had spent significant time also in Ohio (his native state), California, and Missouri, accumulating memories and family relationships that he recalled years later. And, was it an accident that Lanny was hearing from another traveler, Fred Hyde, who told stories from faraway places in Asia about people and places and episodes that had bonded him with ‘family’? Lanny says he was crying one moment, and laughing the next as Fred shared, and so the recollections that Lanny’s mind accessed were not far below the surface of his being. Not much was required to make him remember all the people who had educated him in one way or another – Catherine Ruh and Elsie Dillon, two elementary Sunday school teachers; musical mentors, role models, and instructors like Frank Meier, Ruth Morgan, Lois Ann Newstrand, and Aiko Onishi; other teachers who had nothing to do with music, like a certain statistics professor at Ohio State, and his high school English teacher, Dorothy Moore; and mentors like Janice Moore, James K. Stewart, and George Chambers, some of whom may not have been completely aware of their influence on Lanny. Lanny writes that all of these people touched his life, and so it was difficult to single out any one person to whom he could dedicate ‘God’s Family’, though George Chambers, a pastor when Lanny was growing up, came the closest (Lanny does dedicate another song, “God’s Wonderful Family”, to George). Lanny’s own family, his parents and brothers and sisters are among the pictures he includes in the cast of characters, of course.  Family reunions, including those Christian family get-togethers, are among Lanny’s treasures, with one picture among his collection, in which he singles out his father and mother (Pearl Leo and Precious Ida), Golva Chambers (George’s wife), Grace Stith, Mary Gianvito, Carolyn Cooper, Pam McClain, Paul and Bonnie Brown, and Alice McComb. Would it surprise us if Lanny said there were many, many others?

 

It’s also no surprise that Lanny’s family memories contain not only tears and laughter (chorus), but expectations of this family’s reunion time, forever. It’s no accident that this theme runs through all three verses and his chorus. Lanny must have concluded, even at the 30-something age when he wrote the song, that the gift of God’s family is so special, that God will not contemplate our eternity without such a group. He (God) knows you and I need others. Now and in what’s to come. Thank you Lanny, for sharing your family with us who’ve heard your story! You make me think about my own family. Do you think we have in common some of the same family members? Just think….I’ll meet yours, and you’ll meet mine someday for the first time. What an introduction-reunion that will be!

 

 

See this site to obtain the book “More than Wonderful”, where the story to the song is found: https://paradigmmusic.net/

 

Author’s biography is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanny_Wolfe

Reach Out to Jesus -- Ralph R. Carmichael

 

It was therapy, he probably would say in his own unique way. Ralph Richard Carmichael was anything but conventional when it came to the expression of his Christian faith in the music he wrote, so when he urged people to “Reach Out to Jesus” as he had done, some people probably scoffed and said ‘that guy made his own trouble, so he should just lie in the bed he made’. Ralph had pushed the envelope of what many considered was acceptable in musical expression, particularly among Christians, ever since he was a college student (at Southern California Bible School [SCBC; now Vanguard University] in Costa Mesa). So, some 20 years later (1960s), when he had to admit to himself that he was just existing but not ‘having fun anymore’, that his personal and spiritual life was broken, Ralph wrote something that he himself needed to say and do. It was like a mid-life crisis, you might say, that drove Carmichael back to the roots of a pact he had made with his Lord, so many years before while in Costa Mesa.

 

Ralph became known as the ‘Father of Contemporary Christian Music’ for his innovative style in the 1960’s-1970’s scene, but his journey toward that nickname had some valleys as well as peaks. He grew up learning to play the violin, and soon yearned to adapt the instrumental chords routinely played over the radio waves to church music, a desire that made him a pariah among many church groups when he pursued this penchant beginning in college. Ralph’s musical prodigy and determination could not be ignored, however, and his career in the Christian music industry burgeoned in several ways, while he also became a hot commodity in the popular music industry.  Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, and Elvis Presley were but a few of the ‘stars’ with whom Ralph collaborated. Yet, his life, 15-20 years into this arena, had become too intense – leading him into workaholism, drug use, a divorce, and a breakdown in his finances. This was when he re-dug his foundation, so to speak, and began to write more intently to coax his faith in God. During Ralph’s re-birth, the Billy Graham Association films, for which he continued to write, was one venue he had to buoy his spirit. And, so Carmichael turned his attention increasingly and exclusively toward the Christian music industry. By 1968, perhaps a time that made many people in America wonder if their world was coming apart, Ralph told others how he had reconnected to Jesus.  He asked himself a series of six questions, focusing on his life that had earlier become burdensome (v.1), depressing (v.2), and wearisome (v.1), leaving him famished (v.2). Moreover, he had been anxious about the future (v.2), about the ‘…danger yet unknown’ (v.1). Nineteen sixty-eight was a time that most remember as a cultural and political upheaval, and apparently reaching out to Jesus was not a concept confined to Ralph and other Christians like Billy Graham; the song was part of Elvis’ 1971 Grammy Award-winning album He Touched Me. It seems that Ralph’s troubles and his own therapy resonated with the wider world.

 

Got problems? Who doesn’t? What Ralph Carmichael’s song and its genesis indicate is too true to keep quiet. Where else can one turn, but to the Creator, when one’s life is turning inside out? One can find his own solution that might seem like it’s working for a while, like running away as so many did in the 1960’s-1970’s. How does it feel to keep running or hiding, though? Ralph probably thought that the work and stimulants were effective for a while, too. Eventually, the physical and emotional rhythms distressed Ralph’s insides, and he needed an embrace, not a faster life.  He knew on whom he could call, the One who could be more than a temporary fix. Ralph and you and I need a permanent solution for our temporal issues. Give the Eternal One a chance at answering your questions.  

 

 

 

Information on the author can be found here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/c/a/r/m/carmichael_rr.htm

 

And here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Carmichael

 

See especially here: https://web.archive.org/web/20060905031305/https://www.vanguard.edu/uploadedFiles/Alumni/Magazine/music_in_his_soul_from_vumag_fall_05.pdf

 

Also here: https://web.archive.org/web/20060712204256/http://www.gmahalloffame.org/inductee_bio.cfm?ID=324

I'll Meet You in the Morning -- Albert E. Brumley

 

For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:5)

 

Was Albert Brumley a morning person? If he wasn’t before the mid-1930s, he must have changed his mind, you’d probably say! Whether or not he had seen a morning sunrise like the one pictured here (painted by Claude Monet in 1872), Brumley had an image of how that endless morning would look, of saying to someone “I’ll Meet You in the Morning”. Did Albert expect to see that morning soon when he penned the words of three verses in 1936? Was he reading something that made him think, or was he longing to see someone again whom he missed? Maybe he was just trying to coax some others that the end of terrestrial existence wasn’t a time to dread.

 

Any number of factors may have contributed to Albert’s thoughts in 1936 about the future’s daybreak. Since his words indicate he was pondering the spiritual, the bible’s many expressions regarding this time may have stirred his imagination, including the ancient song that we know as Psalm 30, written by his musical predecessor David. Who the ‘you’ is that Albert wanted to greet in the afterlife is unknown, but there could be plenty of people that he meant, not unlike those whom you or I would have in mind. Albert had been married five years, having met and married in 1931 his wife Goldie, with whom he would raise a family of six children. Though they were yet a young family at that point, Albert and Goldie must have looked forward to the brood they would have together. Could it also be that Albert wanted to preserve the bonds with his mentor Eugene Bartlett, to whom he owed so much for the musical life that he had begun in 1926 with his help? Or, was it Joe Schell, his father-in-law, who was an occasional sounding board, in addition to Goldie, for Albert’s musical inventions? The Brumleys also belonged to a church in Powell, Missouri, so there could have been any number of spiritual family with whom Albert wanted to share the coming eternal dawn, even if he was just 31 at that point in his life. No doubt, Albert also must have pondered what it would be like to finally meet his God face-to-face, making his words ‘How do you do?’ (refrain) and ‘…exchange the old cross for a crown’ (v.2) the best clues pointing to whom Brumley was imagining.    

 

What was David saying in his ode that may have resonated with Albert in the 1930s? David was overjoyed, reveling in God’s provision for him in times when his own mortality was at risk. To be lifted out of that danger, and set upon a rock, and to know that even His discipline and anger do not have to leave the repentant person eternally condemned, was a source of unspeakable joy. Well, it would have been unspeakable, except that David did speak of it. Albert’s journey by 1936, even for a relatively young man, embodied much that was worthy of an exclamation point, particularly how he met and was befriended by Eugene Bartlett (see the restoration movement link below). His life was almost penniless at one point in 1926, and yet he was able to ponder 10 years later the opposite end of the spectrum -- the eternal blessings of a morning yet to come. He’d come a long way in 10 years, but could imagine the distance and the time that, for some, might seem to be light years away. Can you picture it, today? Is morning still far away, or can you see it?

 

See a brief biography of composer here: http://www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/b/r/u/m/brumley_ae.htm   

 

And here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_E._Brumley

 

Also here: https://hymnary.org/person/Brumley_Albert

 

See a very good personal biography of the author here: https://www.therestorationmovement.com/_states/tennessee/brumley.htm

 

See biography on composer in Our Garden of Song, edited by Gene C. Finley, Howard Publishing Company, West Monroe, Louisiana, 1980.