Robert Dixon, a Kindred Spirit

Robert I. Dixon is a delightful fellow from Battle Creek and Bellevue who loves music as much as I do. We both worked in different fields from our passion of music, and we really enjoyed our work, but we have also been very involved in music for most of our lives. And now that he and I are both retired, we seem to love music more than ever, and we seldom say no to any invitation to sing or play.

Born in 1934, Bob grew up in Bellevue and has moved back to this town now. Bob explained to me that he realized when he was quite young that he was not athletically inclined and not interested in fishing or hunting. On the other hand, he played both clarinet and saxophone in school and sang in junior and senior years at Bellevue High School and then in Summer School at Michigan State.

He joined the Battle Creek Barbershoppers group 50 years ago, when he was almost 30, and in 1983, when he had been there for 18 years, he was elected “Barbershopper of the Year” for the Battle Creek Chapter.

He was active in its district administration, and in 1979, he was named “Area Counselor of the Year” by the pioneer district. He is still a very happy member now, after a half century, and he will be going to Tennessee next year to receive a 50-year award.

Because of his regular job which involved selling propane equipment all over the United States and also all of Canada, he wasn’t able to go to many International Conventions with the barbershop group, but he did go to one in Chicago back in 1966 and another in Detroit, in 1982, and loved them both.

Bob’s favorite kind of singing is with quartets. As he puts it, “There is nothing that can be compared to four voices perfectly turned and creating an expanded sound.” Over the years he has been a part of numerous local quartet groups including “Millionaires,” “Circuit Breakers,” “Village Rambles,” and “United Sound Assembly.”

Then, after he retired from his job in 2,000, Bob also joined the “M-66 Express,” and now the latest quartet he’s joined is called “Hometown Sounds.” He also sang in the choir of the St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Battle Creek for 30 years.

Bob’s first wife died 11 years ago, and though he was of course very sad, he remarried in the next year. His new wife is a lovely woman named Ione, whom he had known since way back in 1969. She has two children, and several of Bob’s children babysat for them years ago.

It’s not surprising that Bob had parents who were very musical and an aunt who is an organist and choir director in several churches in Windsor, Ontario. And all six of his children are musically talented as well.

One son, Chuck Dixon, had a master's degree in music education and serves as an assistant band director in Pennfield. Another son, David, performs at the Zarzuela Restaurant in Marshall on open-mic night. And Bob’s daughter, Carol, got to go to Europe to play her bassoon with Blue Lake Summer Program. Bob now has nine grandchildren and three step grandchildren, and he feels sure that they all love music, as well.

As a response to all of these years of musical joy, Bob especially loves the song “Thanks for the Memories,” and I feel sure he would happily sing it for you if you asked him.

The Great Songster, Stephen Foster

I’ve played classical music with various orchestras since I was in middle school, back in 1952, and believe me, I love it all.

For the past five years, however, I’ve been playing popular songs mostly for old folks, and I love playing them, too. I don’t have to practice difficult music anymore, and I am fortunately able to play any song I know by ear. That is really appreciated by old folks, for I can walk to their table or bed and play their requests without having to have any music or stands.

A favorite composer of many old songs I often play is the very talented composer from the 1800s, Stephen Collins Foster.

By the time Foster was just six years old, in 1832, he had taught himself the clarinet and could pick any tune by ear. He started composing as a young teen and did it the rest of his life. Sad to say, he lived only for 37 1/2 years, from 1826 to 1864, but he composed over 200 songs, including such jewels as “Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” “Old Folks at Home,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Old Black Joe,” “Beautiful Dreamer,” and “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair.”

He grew up in Philadelphia, but he moved to New York with his wife, Jane Denny McDowell and daughter in 1860, for what would be the last four years of his life. Unfortunately, his wife and daughter left him when he was just 34, and he would live for only three more years.

He became impoverished while living there and also had to stay in bed for some days because he had a high fever. While he was so weak, he fell against a washbasin and wounded his head. Just three days later, he died.

Foster didn’t make a lot of money during his life, partly because back then it was not common for people to make a living creating popular songs. Also, he was not a very good businessman and simply gave some of his songs away for no money.

Even now, however, many of his songs are still well known and loved. “My Old Kentucky Home” is the official state song of Kentucky, for example, and “Old Folks at Home” is the official state song of Florida.

Unlike many composers, Foster also wrote the words to most of his songs. Here is a really good example from one of my favorites, “Beautiful Dreamer.”

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,

Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee.

Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,

Lull’d by the moonlight have all passed away.

Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song,

List while I woo thee with soft melody.

Gone are the cares of life's busy throng,

Beautiful dreamer awake unto me.

Beautiful dreamer awake unto me!

Foster is still well honored in Pittsburgh, where he was born and where he lived during quite a bit of his life. At the campus of the University of Pittsburgh, there is a landmark building called the Stephen Foster Memorial. It contains a “Center for American Music” and two theaters as well as a museum about Foster’s life and his achievements.

Foster has been rightly acknowledged as "Father of American Music." He was added to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970 and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2010.

I suggest you go to YouTube, where you can hear a number of his wonderful songs. “Beautiful Dreamer,” for example, is available in nine different renderings.

Georgia O'Keeffe, Distinctive American Artist

I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore. "  - Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe was an amazing woman who painted thousands of pictures and created some sculptures as well throughout her extremely long, successful life.

She certainly loved painting, for she kept doing it until two years before her death at age 98. Her eyesight finally started to fail when she was 90, but she nevertheless kept creating pictures until she was almost 96.

Georgia started painting as a young child, as her two grandmothers had done, and by the time she was 12, her family arranged for private lessons, for they realized that she was extremely talented. A child of a large family, she was very satisfied, saying later, “I seem to be one of the few people I know of to have no complaints against my first twelve years.”

It’s interesting that she was also talented in music and played the piano very well. As she said rather amusingly, as a young adult, “Singing has always seemed to me the most perfect means of expression, but since I cannot sing, I paint.”

Georgia eventually married the photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, when she was 37 years old and he was 52. Alfred was born in 1864 in this country but spent almost a decade in Europe as a young man. They had met much earlier than their marriage, and over the years they exchanged some 25,000 letters, some of those letters being 40 pages long.

Stieglitz had promoted her first “Solo Show” in 1917, and he truly admired her amazing skills. Both Georgia and Alfred were extremely independent, however, and their marriage, though it lasted for 22 years, was hardly ideal. For one thing, Georgia loved the southwest and often went there for months without her husband. As Laurie Lisle says in her book called “Portrait of An Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe,” he was not happy about it, feeling that “Her infatuation with New Mexico might be stronger than her loyalty to [me.]”

Georgia did realize that the marriage was not perfect, saying at one point, “I think I would never have minded Stieglitz being anything he happened to be if he hadn't kept me so persistently off my track.” She also said about spending so much time in New Mexico, “I chose coming away because here at least I feel good — and it makes me feel I am growing very tall and straight inside.”

Eventually, when he turned 80, Albert felt very weak, and he died at 82. Though Georgia said honestly that she missed him, she lived for 40 more years happily alone. From what I’ve read about her, I think she actually preferred being alone and concentrating more fully on her painting. As some people put it, she was a "loner, a severe figure and self-made person."

I learned a lot about this extremely talented lady by reading Lisle’s book about her, and I recommend it to anyone who loves art.

I always wish I could let you hear some tunes when I do columns about music, but you can easily can get tunes on “YouTube” on your computer. And now I wish I could include a number of O'Keeffe's wonderful art works in this one. But there is another book about her called “Georgia O'Keeffe” by Charles C. Eldredge, which has over 100 of her pictures. Also, you see a number of her paintings simply by going to “Georgia O'Keeffe prints” online.

Tchaikovsky, depressed composer of beautiful music

     Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1840–1893, was an amazingly successful Russian composer, but, sad to say, he was also very depressed for much of his life.

     The first sad occasion in his life was that his parents sent him, against his will, to the School of Jurisprudence for a career as a civil servant when he was just 10 years old. It was 800 miles away from his family’s home, and he had to stay there for nine years and study law for seven years. Also, his mother died when he was just 14, and he suffered from her death for the rest of his life. As he himself said, "Every moment of that appalling day is as vivid to me as though it were yesterday." 

     Though he studied law for such a long time, he also involved himself in music and went to a conservatory to study. He then became a Professor of Music Theory at the Moscow Conservatory and started composing seriously. 

     Eventually he composed six symphonies and three wonderful ballets, including “Swan Lake,” “The Sleeping Beauty,” and, of course, “The Nutcracker Suite.” He also composed eleven operas, five concertos, three for piano and one each for violin and cello, and over 100 other works, including many songs. 

     His personal life, however, despite his success, was full of problems. They were probably largely because he was homosexual, and that was, of course, an even bigger problem back then. He lived as a bachelor most of his life, but in 1877, at the age of 37, he married a former student, Antonina Miliukova, perhaps just to appear more “normal.”  They had huge problems, however, from the very beginning, and lived together for less than a couple of months. They never divorced, probably only because it was not at all common or easy back then, but they never lived together again. 

     He had another relationship as well, this time with Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy widow who really helped him by giving him money each month. It was a large enough amount that he was able to stop teaching music and focus exclusively on composition. Their relationship was extremely odd, however, for she said she purposely never wanted to meet him in person. They did stay in close contact during those 13 years, exchanging over 1,000 letters, but they never saw each other.

     She said of their relationship, "I am very unsympathetic in my personal relations because I do not possess any femininity whatever; second, I do not know how to be tender, and this characteristic has passed on to my entire family. All of us are afraid to be affected or sentimental, and therefore the general nature of our family relationships is comradely, or masculine, so to speak."

     After he created many successful works and became very popular, Tchaikovsky traveled a great deal all over Europe and even into this country. He always enjoyed going back to Russia, however, even though his music was extremely influenced by Mozart and also by other composers in Europe. It’s therefore not surprising that he was much admired in many countries besides his and was even awarded an honorary Doctor of Music in England by the University of Cambridge.     He died quite suddenly, at just 53, either from cholera or from suicide. Apparently it has never been known for sure just what caused his death, but it is certainly known that despite all of his success, he was often depressed by his mother’s early death and by the many problems he had to face because of homosexuality.