This is the final installment of a biography of mentor and friend Dick Woods. See here for the entire series.
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About the author
Because my time in Houston was so formative, it was all too easy to pepper my own memoirs throughout the posts on Dick Woods at St. John the Divine, Houston. Had I published this as a bona fide biography of him, those personal memoirs and musings might have gotten in the way of his narrative and would have to be managed carefully in footnotes. But some of that personal material presented itself as a curious new creation here: a version of my own biographical sketch as told through the experience of working with Dick:
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As a fellow from the city of Statesville in the piedmont / foothills region of North Carolina [not to be confused, please, with Statesboro, Ga., nor with the Stateville Correctional Center in Ill.], I was raised on Hamburger Helper, livermush, hot dogs, Shoney’s, green beans, sweet tea, Dairy Queen, and no alcohol. It was the usual Southern childhood involving the usual Southern style of parenting and the usual profound loathing of junior high school. It also included the usual piano lessons, beginning at age 8.
After six years of piano study with the most esteemed teacher in my area, my fortune took a turn when I attended the North Carolina School of the Arts as a piano principal, in the big city of Winston-Salem, forty miles from home. I spent three glorious years there, tenth through twelfth grades. From there, it was on to Appalachian State University in the smallish but growing town of Boone, N.C., 68 miles from home, to double-major in piano and organ performance. From there, it was on to Rice University in the gargantuan city of Houston, 1098 miles from home, to continue the journey in organ.
All that to say that upon my arrival in Houston in 1990, ‘country had come to town.’ Not only had I had no more than medium-sized church experience, the majority of it Baptist and the entirety of it non-liturgical, I also had the country boy thing going. Dick amused himself by repeating some of my vowels back to me. I distinctly remember one day asking him to ‘puht sum fraawnk aawn’ (‘put some Franck on’), and he chortled for days after that, repeating ‘fraawnk aawn’ several times. Although I experienced shame at that, it did much to awaken the professional listener in me. I began to tune in to every nuance of language and dialect as carefully as my professor Clyde Holloway was training me to listen to every note I played. And yes, you’re damn right (‘daay-um raat’) I am now the best listener in the music and language business.
I began to notice my North Carolina twang morphing into a Texas drawl. Meanwhile, I was quick to inform his holiness that by the way, my alma mater is pronounced app-a-LATCH-un, thank you [thaah-eenk yew] very much. Not app-a-LAYTCH-un nor app-a-LAYSH-un, and it was time for all youse Pittsburghers to learn that. Dick just called it ASU thereafter. Safer that way, no doubt.
I met Dick in April 1990. While I was in town hunting for an apartment for graduate school, my professor Clyde Holloway sent me to interview with Dick for the open position of Assistant Organist/Choirmaster. I began work at the church on August 1 of that year, as Dick’s last assistant. Dick told me he had to push a bit to get me past the Music Committee, sight unseen to them. He trusted Dr. Holloway’s recommendation of me for the position, and therefore he trusted me. And my hiring must have meant that the Music Committee trusted Dick that time.
I was on high alert. Everything was new, and everything was high-powered. Not only had I embarked at Rice University on the highest-stakes training endeavors of my life so far, but I was also thrilled yet nearly terrified to be in such a large city and such a large church and beginning to hear Texas-sized tales of money, music, accomplishment, and politics. Being on such high alert, I quietly filed away in my brain just about every lesson that came my way: to whom to speak, from whom to run, what to do or not do in this or that liturgy, how to behave, how to stop behaving, how to refine my choral accompanying skills, how to eat chips and salsa and drink margaritas, where to get a haircut, and how to navigate the quickest yet least pothole-plagued routes between my apartment and the church and Rice. These lessons came at me constantly, and I wanted to learn as much as I could. That was a delicate tightrope act, because I didn’t want anyone to discover that I actually didn’t know very much about anything in life beyond music. At the risk of unnecessary presentism all these years later, I have realized many times over just how naïve yet arrogant I really was. Surely Dick must have shielded me from more woes and foes than I realized, and surely the rector tolerated me more with Dick there to run interference.
After resigning from St. John’s in 1994, I took an interim position waaaaay across town at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit. That was a disaster, honestly: I had left the place of Dick’s memory; I had left many friends in the choir; I was still quite young and inexperienced and yet placed in charge, and I was beginning to discover to my horror and annoyance how lax liturgy was becoming in all corners. Furthermore, Holy Spirit had just said goodbye to their own long-time music director [Brian Taylor, headed to St. Mary’s Cathedral in Memphis] and were as emotionally spent as I was. None of us gee-hawed very well, to quote my maternal grandmother. [Aside: I was also battling some tendonitis, and neither the three-manual tracker at that church nor the ten-key data entry at a side job helped with that. But all glory be to technique study with Clyde Holloway – I have been pain-free ever since.]
During that period, I also signed on with a temp agency to make ends meet, eventually landing full-time in an apartment management firm’s national home office. Dick was always perched on my shoulder, reminding me to keep the redneck in check. Funny thing was that I was surrounded by many more rednecks in that office than anywhere else. Rather, what I realized for the first time was that I had learned to function quite competently among collars of all colors, and I could just relax. That remains the most cathartic moment of my entire side career as a frequent counseling client.
In 1995, I signed on as organist at St. Philip Presbyterian, Houston, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Smartest, most musico-liturgical-savvy congregation I ever worked for. Then in 1997, the allure of the magnificent Aeolian-Skinner instruments at First Presbyterian beckoned, and I began a tenure there, having the musical time of my life but being reminded at every turn of the game of church politics. Dick tried to set up shop on my shoulder again, but there wasn’t room for him there anymore. I finally laid him to rest in about 1999, six years after his death.
I didn’t pick up any Pennsylvania Dutch from Dick, and I certainly avoided saying ‘Yewston.’ I lived in Houston 1990-2004 and since 2004 have been teaching at my alma mater back in North Carolina, where my original twang has not returned in the full force I expected. The Texas swagger and drawl have remained. I hear some of Clyde Holloway [Texarkana] in my voice now.
Ever since ‘Yewston,’ I have spotted various mentors just under the surface in nearly everything I do. I teach my organ students much like Clyde Holloway taught us. I mentor them much like my undergraduate professor H. Max Smith mentored us. I teach my sacred music students everything I got from Dick and then some. Only my music theory pedagogy appears to be my own, and that garnered me a teaching award in 2025. Meanwhile, much of my humor still comes from Dick and from my maternal grandfather and from a friend whom Dick hated but who was essential to his AIDS care.
The voice of this Southeastern-country-boy-turned-Texas-cowboy-turned-professor enjoys a bit of local celebrity now. In 2023 I was invited to serve as the Voice of the Appalachian State University Marching Mountaineers. It thrills me to no end to participate in that capacity, which I will do and keep teaching until I retire from Appalachian [again, that’s app-a-LATCH-un] in 2029. As it turns out, Dick would be 100.
And with that, our lengthy series is ended. Nunc dimittis Richard Forrest Woods.