Military Music - Military Times

Pianist from the South shared music with world

In 1921, a postal worker in Americus, Ga., watched intently as his baby son, Matthew, ran his fingers along the table as if he was playing piano.

Royal Kennedy said to his wife, Mary: “I think something special is in the baby and I think it’s music. Whatever it is, you develop it.”

That became the mission of Mary, a schoolteacher, a few months later when Royal died of a heart attack. When Matthew was 4, he played piano by ear.

Years later, after his sister had taught him all she knew, his mother found a white piano teacher who would accept a student of color. Mary Kennedy sent Matthew to The Juilliard School in New York and groomed him to be worthy of the spotlight on the international stage.

At the same time, she also taught him to draw no attention to himself offstage, to ward off danger in the segregated rural South.

“I think she was saying I’d be fine as long as I stayed in my place,” says Kennedy, 86.

Now, through a documentary his daughter created, Kennedy’s accomplishments are finding their place in history on film. “Matthew Kennedy: One Man’s Journey” tells the story of a man who in the 1940s was known worldwide as a classical concert pianist — garnering rave reviews in France, Canada and Italy — but remained largely unknown back home.

First as a pianist and later as director of Fisk University’s famed Jubilee Singers for more than two decades, Kennedy’s journey included performing at Carnegie Hall, sharing programs with Eleanor Roosevelt and Lucille Ball, dining with Henry Ford and traveling to Europe, the Far East, the Caribbean and South America.

“For years, when he directed the singers, the singers got all the attention,” says Reavis Mitchell, a professor and chairman of the Fisk history department in Nashville, Tenn. “He was the ultimate director, but he didn’t have to step out front. It’s like he submerged himself within his students.”

Kennedy, who retired from Fisk in 1986, sits in a den full of boxes and stacks of mementos reflecting a few highlights of a long career. His Fisk degree rests atop a cardboard box, and black-and-white photos of family members and famous performers line the walls.

He has several photos of his wife of 45 years, Anne Gamble Kennedy, who died in 2001. Also a pianist, she was his biggest fan and harshest critic.

“She was really a person who desperately sought perfection and worked at it very, very diligently,” says Kennedy, who still sports his gold wedding ring.

A man of quiet dignity, he measures his words as carefully as the notes he plays on a nearby piano. With long, elegant fingers, his hands appear to be that of a man half his age. But as he holds a magazine, his thumbs begin to shake.

“There was a time when my fingers were very flexible,” he says. “They’re not so flexible now.”

His talent emerged at age 4, when he stunned his family by playing by ear “It’s Me, O Lord, Standin’ in the Need of Prayer.”

“It was God-given talent at the outset,” he says. “So what I received as a divine gift, I have attempted to pursue. I think hard work and the gift have worked together. I was fortunate in having teachers who wanted to encourage me and push me.”

When his teacher in Americus taught him all she knew, she referred him to a teacher in Macon, who persuaded his mother to move him to New York and try to get him into Juilliard. After graduating with a Juilliard piano diploma in 1940, he entered Fisk that same year and began touring with the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

Despite the group’s international fame, his mother’s rules for survival in two separate worlds were still applicable. While touring in Kansas, the group’s director, Mrs. James A. Myers, got initial approval in a hotel restaurant for the group to eat there; the students were seated in a private dining room with tables that had been set.

“But within a few minutes, the waitress came in and told us that she was sorry that she couldn’t serve us and we would have to leave,” he said. “Well, we were all so disappointed because we thought we were about to enjoy a nice meal in this hotel. As we were walking through the foyer, we could hear glasses breaking behind the counter.

“The man in charge was breaking all of the glasses that any of us had used to have water before our orders were taken. He let it be known that no one would have to drink from those glasses. That might have been the most hurtful experience I had had up to that point.”

Kennedy says his journey has been a phenomenal one.

“I feel the world has opened up to appreciate my efforts and that means a lot for me, and it means a lot for me to feel that I have been able to make a positive contribution.”

He says some people now treat him differently.

“One person said to me, ‘I had no idea that you had experienced so many things. It really gives me a different perspective on your life and causes me to appreciate you all the more.’ ”