The month of April 1984 brought two trips to Nashville for me, both of them in connection with my activities in the Bartlett High School chorus. On the weekend of April 14, we had the Tennessee Music Educators' Association Convention in Nashville, which was the occasion for the All-State Chorus, All-State Band and All-State Orchestra performances at the Andrew Jackson Center for the Performing Arts, which was a new state-of-the-art facility in downtown Nashville. Having made All-West Chorus in the Fall of 1983, I had made All-State chorus both as a singer and an accompanist, and had to choose which one to participate in. I had met Kevin Whalum, a baritone from Melrose High School during All-West Tennessee Chorus in December, and he had also made All-State Tennessee Chorus, as I had, so we hung out for most of the weekend in Nashville. The TMEA had put us up at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Nashville, and after our performance on Friday, Kevin had invited me to a room on the 22nd floor of the hotel where a lot of the Memphis students were having a party with Domino's Pizzas and sodas. Eventually, some students from Memphis named Peggye Love and Lisa McGhee joined with a singer from Humboldt named Tommie McCurrie and me, and we walked from the hotel to the Legislative Plaza, and then back to the hotel at about 3 in the morning. After breakfast the next morning, a student from Jackson Northside named Larry Smith and I headed over to the Andrew Jackson Performing Arts Center to check out the All-State Symphonic Band. The band was playing an absolutely amazing modern composition that neither of us recognized, which ultimately proved to be Joaquin Turina's La Procesion del Rocio. I was already somewhat familiar with Turina, a Spanish composer, because of a rather bluesy, sultry piano piece in an anthology of sheet music I had. That piece was called Preludio de Fantasia Sobre Cinco Notas and it had first awakened my interest in Turina. The unexpected accident of hearing the symphonic band play another Turina work that was also full of jazzy, bluesy harmonies made me a huge fan of Joaquin Turina and his music. I remain a fan of it to this day.
The second trip which took us back to Nashville was for the Bartlett High School Chorus and Show Choir to perform in the American Music Festival at Opryland USA, an amusement park that later closed and was torn down to make way for the Opry Mills Mall. At the time, the festival was one of the largest such festivals of school musicians in the United States, and we had a considerable amount of fun listening to the other schools from all over the country performing a considerable amount of choral music. Of course it was the modern choral music that caught my attention over the weekend, and I recall hearing Pablo Casals' "O Vos Omnes" and John Rutter's "For The Beauty of The Earth", along with "Feller From Fortune", "Flower of Beauty", "Down By The Sally Gardens" and John Ness Beck's "Song of Moses". We had three choirs entered in the competition, a chamber choir, the regular advanced chorus, and our show choir. The chamber choir had performed a beautiful setting of the gospel standard "Precious Lord" that I recall was handwritten on manuscript paper and unpublished. Despite its unknown (and presumably local) provenance, this arrangement must have circulated extensively, as I encountered it again several years later, played by Jackson Central Merry's marching band as a warm-up before a band competition at Rothrock Stadium, and later yet, the fabulous Memphis singer Earlise Taylor performed the same arrangement at one of her recitals. The Bartlett High Advanced Chorus had performed William Levi Dawson's "Ain't A That Good News" and John Rutter's "Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind", which was just about the first choral piece I ever sang at Bartlett High School. Of course the school could not afford to put us up at as nice a hotel as the TMEA had, so we were at a non-descript Best Western on the east side of the Cumberland River. But the hotel put Bartlett High School's name on the marquee, and we all had a ball. One of our choirs won a first place award, but I can no longer recall if it was the Bartlett Chamber Singers or the Advanced Chorus.
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