Simple Songs: In Praise of the Feminine Touch
by Ron Simpson
Utah songwriter advocate and General Manager, Tantara Records
We’re standing around the piano in our daughter’s Tokyo living room, the week of grandson Ian’s baptism. “Dad, I just need your advice,” Kristen says. “You see, I’ve invited three families of boys Ian goes to school with, and I think they’re all coming to the baptism. Ian has asked me to sing, and I want the music to be perfect.”
As we start turning pages and singing through some songs with my wife Maisa at the piano, I start noticing three things. First, these simple songs about baptism and the Holy Ghost in the Children’s Songbook are moving me. There are tears in my eyes as we sing through them and I’m embarrassed. Second, I’m struck by how many of the songwriters I’ve met through the years. And third, the majority of these wonderful, effective songs, seem to be crafted or co-authored by the women in our LDS songwriting community.
We settle on two songs: This Is My Beloved Son, with music by Vanya Y. Watkins, followed by When I Am Baptized, words and music by Nita Milner, a writer whom I haven’t met. I contribute some transition ideas and an ending, Kristen and Maisa run through the medley a few times, and we’re ready. Ian approves.
But I stay at the piano after the others have gone, looking through the Primary book and the hymnal, celebrating these simple songs, songs that not only teach truth but strike an emotional nerve. My attention eventually drifts…I’m recalling a party with a roomful of Mormon musicians.
“Ron, who taught you piano?” someone asks. I smile ruefully: piano is not my strongest skill.
“Well, nobody.” I answer, and hasten to add, “But Vanya Watkins tried the hardest.” She was still Yorgason when I had my weekly lessons at BYU, and she was so good for me, sensing there was music inside me-I think she knew I played bass and guitar reasonably well, and that I composed and arranged adequately, but that I was somehow buffaloed by the eye-to-hand coordination required to play both hands and read at the piano. She never lost her enthusiasm or her ability to encourage me, and we began to settle for, “Well, the two-part invention is certainly better than last week,” when she so would have wanted to say, “Ron, it’s good!”
Soon after our BYU piano experience, Vanya’s first songs began to appear in Church publications. There was a sense in the music community that hers was a daring and fresh voice. Now, in Tokyo, I was reviewing quite a body of her work, all of it good, and much of it absolutely magical.
Two weeks earlier I wouldn’t have been able to identify songwriter Jeanne Lawler (When Jesus Christ Was Baptized). But I’d just met Area President Hancock at a district conference in Vladivostok, and he had talked between meetings about being a young boy in Glendale, California, when the poem, “I Am a Child of God” arrived in the mail from Naomi Randall, and Mildred Pettit set to work composing the melody. The discussion was all the more poignant, because the news of Sister. Randall’s death was still fresh.
“Today,” he commented, “Sister. Jeanne Lawler is about the last of the ladies who were writing Primary songs in the early fifties (see Hinges, ca.1953) keeping that grand tradition alive.” I looked at several more of her songs, and agreed.
I’ve been fortunate that my own path has intersected with so many of the great contemporary female LDS songwriters in the recording studio, in the classroom, or in connection with score preparation or music engraving.
Janine Brady, who could write a song in the morning, another at lunch and yet another in the afternoon, has a knack of teaching values with melodies and words that stick like glue in the minds of young listeners. Grietje Rowley (Be Thou Humble), Joleen Meredith (Where Can I Turn for Peace) and JoAnn Doxey (I’ll Seek the Lord Early While in my Youth) have a melodic gift that you can’t help admire (read: covet). And then the present generation: Staci Peters, Hilary Weeks, Julie de Azevedo, Jenny Jordan Frogley, Julia Davis Allen, and Cherie Call, all of whom have come in contact with the songwriting program at BYU, have put themselves through a tough learning curve, and are now contributing brilliant work.
Several decades before, there had been Mirla Greenwood Thayne. I’ll never forget a phone call from Mirla in the middle of a recording session at Sound Column. She spoke nonstop. “Hello, Ron? I got some great news today. The Osmonds want to put I Wonder When He Comes Again on their Christmas album. Isn’t that great?
When Mabel Jones Gabbott (In Humility, Our Savior) came into a songwriter’s workshop at Sound Column, I was awestricken. I had admired her hymn lyrics since I was a young boy in California. She was such a kind, classy, modest lady, and I couldn’t imagine what I could possibly say to help her improve her craft, which I thought to be consummate.
To all of them, and to the others, including Louise Scott, Pat Davis, Carol Gunn, Joy Lundberg, Claire Dale Terry, Pat Graham, and to the very first Utah songwriter who retained my services as a young arranger and music typesetter–the late and gifted Elaine Clarke–my deepest thanks for your friendship and my admiration for your gifts. Your songs have expressed my own feelings, helped me grow, taught precious values to me and to my family.
Right now you’re thinking, “He’s forgotten Janice Kapp Perry.” No, just saving one of the best for last.
In a 1989 radio interview, Jan Perry told me, “All I ever wanted to do was to write simple songs, like I Am a Child of God. That’s what I’ve asked the Lord to help me do. That’s what I’d like to leave behind as my legacy.”
And I’m sitting here on a quiet piano bench in a Tokyo living room experiencing one of her simple songs: “Heavenly Father, are you really there? Do you hear and answer every child’s prayer?” And I’m feeling very lucky to have known this elect group of sister songcrafters who’ve left us these wonderful, simple, life-changing, value-driven songs.
2001 Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
