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Still conducting after all these years
After leading more concerts than he can keep track of, Caney Fork’s James Dooley knows the one that matters most is the next one.
“I thought perhaps this program might merit a special story,” he said. “We have three brothers singing,” he said when he called two weeks ago. That conversation led to this week’s 1C story about the almost 36-year-old Western Carolina Community Chorus and its ‘Brothers Ginn.’
As usual, Dooley was right. It was fun to talk to Tommy, Richard and Joe Ginn and hear about their musical backgrounds and reasons for making the effort to sing in the same chorus for the first time in years. What also came through loud and clear was the respect bordering on awe the Ginns share for the Community Chorus’ founder and conductor.
“Any time you work with James Dooley it’s an educational experience,” said Tommy, who directs the choir at Sylva First Methodist Church. “It’s like being in a seminar. I walk away form each rehearsal knowing more than when I went in, and I’m a better choir director for it.”
His brothers agree.
“He’s great – absolutely fabulous,” Joe said of Dooley “He’s so good at directing and interpretation.”
“He’s very strict, but we learn so much,” said Richard. “There’s a lot of talent in that group – even in us old folks – and he knows how to bring it out.”
It was for singers like the Ginn brothers that Dooley formed the chorus more than three decades ago.
“Because there was nothing like it,” he said last week when I asked him why he had organized the Community Chorus in addition to his duties as WCU music department head and choral director. “There was no opportunity for experienced singers – people who had sung in high school and college – to sing in a group that could perform oratorios and similar works that church choirs might not undertake.”
Dooley also listed another reason: community involvement.
“I felt the university needed to make that sort of musical group available to the community,” he said.
When Dooley’s Community Chorus performed for the first time in December 1970, I found myself on that same Hoey Auditorium stage. The music was the Christmas portion of Handel’s “Messiah,” and Dooley had assembled all three of his choirs for the production. In addition to the community group, the expanded singers included two WCU student choirs – the University Chorus, of which I was a member, and the Concert Choir. At the time, Dooley directed all three.
As a former member of a Dooley-conducted chorus, the Ginns’ comments seem right on target. He is strict, insisting that everything be done a certain way, but the resulting performances are worth it. I can still remember the painstaking way he would go over each phrase, trying to make sure that all of us would stress the same syllables and make the same vowel sounds and that we sang all the individual notes in the “For unto us a child is bo-o-o-o-o-o-o-rn” part.
Talking to him one afternoon last week, I discovered some other parallels. He grew up near Chattanooga and went to high school and college there. I was born near Chattanooga (in Chickamauga, Ga.) but moved away before starting school. He arrived in Cullowhee from Georgia, just as I did. He left the University of Georgia in 1969 to take over as head of WCU’s music department; I came to WCU in 1970 as a transfer from Young Harris College, a two-year school in the north Georgia mountains. Dooley also knows the choir director who’s the reason I landed in the WCU chorus – Bill Fox, retired music teacher and choir director at Young Harris, who needed another alto in his ensemble and took time to help a novice choral singer learn enough to fill the spot.
Dooley, now a WCU music professor emeritus, retired from the university several years ago but stays busy with the Community Chorus and composing and arranging music. Next week’s concert will feature one of his arrangements, a folk tune titled “Johnny Has Gone For a Soldier,” and the program promises to be another example of Dooley’s painstaking song selection and amazing choral conducting skills.
In addition to the Dooley arrangement, the free concert, set for 8 p.m. next Thursday, April 20, in WCU’s Coulter Building recital hall, will include show tunes from “Fiddler on the Roof,” (a flute will play the fiddle part; Dooley said all the violinists in the area are tied up with an upcoming performance of the Brahms Requiem) “Phantom of the Opera” and “The Fantasticks” as well as several other folk selections.
As Tommy Ginn says, it’s a show everyone can enjoy with songs you can whistle as you walk down the street.
It will also be an opportunity to see a master conductor at work.
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