Remembering Dr. Wilbur James “Jimmie” Abbington: Notes To Self About My Longtime Friend and UM Classmate...
“Rolling up”...
I arrived at The University of Michigan in August 1982. I had spent the previous four years “learning to play the cello at a level that might garner the attention of a listener with some serious and convincing intent”. My senior year was busiest and most fruitful, a culmination of those four growth-filled years that featured two crowning performances of a windchest full of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach at the 50th Baldwin-Wallace College (now University) Bach Festival, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.
Jimmie Abbington arrived sometime “in close succession”. He was a recent graduate of Morehouse College, piano accompanist of the famed Morehouse Men’s Glee Club, directed by Dr. Wendell P. Whalum. I met his fellow Morehouse Glee Club alumnus Frank Ward around the same time. Those early weeks were rather hectic and fun. I can only recall placement exams and auditions that became a sort of “grand welcome reception” given for all the music students at the U-M School of Music (now the School of Music, Theater and Dance).
My earliest memories of Jimmie are always marked by his unique and irrepressible sense of humor. While I don’t believe he intended to “hold regular comic court” among his fellow students, those “comic breaks” always occurred to our profound amusement between classes, rehearsals, the lobbies and practice rooms--all the while developing professional obligations that had already moved beyond the walls of the Moore Music Building on U-M’s North Campus.
The Organ, Ann Arbor and “WE”...
(The famed stride pianist Thomas “Fats” Waller called the organ “The God Box”, and was known to enjoy playing the works of Bach, either in church sanctuaries or theaters.) Jimmie was an indefatigable student of the organ as an instrument of accompaniment to worship. He was also an equally astute practitioner of congregational songs, gospel hymns and African American spirituals. From his small-town West Virginia church beginnings to sanctuaries nationwide, I believe that he made it his goal to make the folk and code songs of former slaves stand on balanced equal footing beside the chorales and choruses of Johann Sebastian Bach–regardless of the skin color or ethnicity of the singers or the listeners.
We were in Ann Arbor when the music world celebrated the Stravinsky centennial and the Brahms sesquicentennial. Thanks to the influence of Dr. Willis Patterson and his dedication to the music of Black American composers, we received an enhanced musical education that brought together and celebrated the beauty of our people, the grandeur of our musical expressions, and the boundless potential of our artistic intellect. The African American students who arrived now float in my memory like a distinct “Who’s Who” list of esteemed musicians, performers, educators and administrators.
It remains a true privilege and honor to have studied alongside them in those halcyon years.
I remain both impressed and humbled at the AA student community I found myself studying, rehearsing, “numb-fumbling” and occasionally scuffling alongside during those brief and amazing years. Jimmie was certainly one of the busiest and most impressive of this group. We now find ourselves all bowing and shaking our heads at so many Facebook posts of glad tidings, well wishes…and the hails and farewells. At times like these we have neither convenient choice nor option aside from the reminder that “ there's a man going round taking names”.
Trajectories, Parallelisms and Concentrics…
I can’t remember exactly when Jimmie’s master’s degree work ended and his years of service at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church began. Hartford is one of the most distinguished African American congregations in the city, having long-standing connections among HBCUs, the University of Michigan and the community of African American musicians in Detroit. Jimmie wasted no time engaging colleagues from U-M in as many church musical activities as the calendar would agreeably allow!! My years of “triangular ricochet” between Ann Arbor, Detroit and Toledo would last from 1982 to 1996, which involved joining the Toledo Symphony, getting married, starting my family and returning to U-M around the same time to pursue doctoral studies.
It turned out that Jimmie had also begun the “DMA commute” from Detroit as well; we shared a memorable semester together as students in a course titled Proseminar In Music Analysis, taught by Professor Elwood Derr. One morning he appeared in class (a crowded affair in one of the too small classrooms on the second floor of the Music Building) with a contemptuous scowl on his face; the reason for this apparent scowl remain a mystery to this day, but both Jimmie and I would mirthfully revisit that moment for years because one of our fellow classmates, a young woman overcome by nervousness burst into tears upon seeing Derr’s scowling face!! I’m sure all the rest of the class were equally on edge, and Derr made our edgy feelings no more comfortable or assured in his presence–at least on that day!!
The class had a solid curricular reputation for preparing DMA students for the qualifying exam in music theory (the “Theory Prelim”), and several students had failed the exam the previous year. Therefore, we were quite nervous about the upcoming semester, the course and our relatively independent preparations for the exam of which we were all given the cryptic recommendation “go to the Music Library Reserve Shelves and study the exam questions from previous years”. Fortunately to my recollection, all of my cohort of DMA students passed the exam including Jimmie. Once that first “hurdle” was cleared and my coursework continued into candidacy, I’m sure that Jimmie’s church service, organ studies (with the ageless Marilyn Mason!!) and growing scholarship in African American spirituals kept him very busy. Our occasional performances at Hartford would be the “few and far between” opportunities for us to rehearse, perform, reminisce and laugh about the past and present.
I tell people that “the Lord and the Chronicle of HIgher Education” brought me to Durham, North Carolina to join the faculty at North Carolina Central University. However, as I continue to teach and now vacillate between administration and performance, I keep discovering numerous connections between my family “village” and NCCU. My family and I (wife and two young daughters) arrived in Durham three days before Hurricane Fran made landfall at Wrightsville Beach, NC (a few miles slightly upshore of Wilmington). Winds of 115 mph, power outages lasting as long as six weeks in remote rural areas, flooding and downed trees brought much of the state to its knees.
At that same time, my U-M friend and colleague Richard Banks, his wife Deborah and son Donnell had settled in Raleigh where Richard had joined the faculty at Saint Augustine’s University. Years later he would join the faculty at NCCU. Jimmie would remain at Hartford for some years before leaving and coming to teach at Shaw University, barely a mile from St. Aug’s!! Louise Toppin had been at East Carolina University (and later on UNC-Chapel Hill) for some years, and would become a collegial “magnet” among so many of us that one alumna coined the phrase “Michigan Mafia” to describe our jocular sense of community and our so-called “geographically arranged control…or controlled geographic arrangement”!!
Morehouse, Black composers, Humor and Practice…
I saw the Morehouse Men’s Glee Club perform live for the first time in Cleveland at Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra. Dr. Wendell Philips Whalum directed, Sam McKelton was a featured soloist on that concert, assistant director David Morrow got to conduct a few selections, and Jimmie Abbington was at the piano. The most impressive memory of that concert wasn’t merely the performance, but it was the audience!! Even in our present time when black folk “turn up” to hear a well-prepared, well-marketed event involving a consistent show of excellence…it leaves a mark and indelibly enhanced self-esteem upon all in attendance. The Glee Club opened the program singing the Soldatenlieder of Johannes Brahms, the 19th century German Romantic composer. The sight and sound of a stage full of black men singing soldier songs left an impression of militarism and militant expression–leveled not against whiteness or white men but against a sustained supremacy that still hampers us today. The last notes the men sang were the songs of their people, their beauty, bravery, tenacity and sustained message of legacy from ancestors to those yet unborn.
Our community of U-M students of the 1980s were unfairly blessed to have direct access to the art music of Black American composers via the scholarship of Dr. Willis C. Patterson, whose volume of Art Songs of Black American Composers was still rather new at the time, and whose local public performances were given quizzical reviews in the press. In August 1985 Patterson brought together African American composers, performers, educators, administrators, musicologists and historians to celebrate and discuss “the way forward” in support of the music of Black Americans. The Black American Music Symposium provided a wealth of opportunities for the community of students and a wealth of access to the composers of music they were challenged to acquaint themselves: Ulysses Kay, David Baker, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Hale Smith, T. J. Anderson, Leslie Adams, Robert Owens, Noel Da Costa, Carman Moore, Kermit Moore, Dorothy Rudd Moore, Adolphus Hailstork, Frederick Tillis, Eva Jessye, Jester Hairston, Brazeal Dennard, Wendell Whalum and a generation of then younger composers, performers, educators, musicologists and historians now pressing forward for the next generation.
Over the years I always enjoyed Jimmie’s tendency to readily engage in humor that always bordered on the “righteously sarcastic”!! I remember our schoolmate Oral Moses taking a few of us aside, and saying to us with lowered chin and tone of voice: “y’all need to SPLIT UP”!! What we now refer to as “Black Joy” was open to misinterpretation, misunderstanding and even a silent gesture of potential mistreatment…usually rooted in misplaced fear. But the use of humor is a unique way and means of truth telling, both to persons, places and positions (things) of power. However, Jimmie’s sense of humor served as also a mantra and mantle which might read thusly: “I must practice my music at least one and a half times as much as I tell jokes and funny stories”. His unique love of the Lord and musical expression was a natural and inextricable extension of his roots, his unique educational opportunities and the professional distinctions that followed. Proverbs 22:29 posits: “Do you see someone skilled in their work? They will serve before kings; they will not serve before officials of low rank.” The main exception that applies to Jimmie in this proverb is that he “served before kings” while making himself accessible to those “of low rank” from the organ bench and choir loft. Psalm 90:17 provides the most fitting benediction: “May the favor of the Lord or God rest on us (Jimmie); establish the work of our hand for us; yes, establish the work of our hands.”
