Elizabeth and Andrew Brown were inspired by the life of Andrew’s father, Ray Francis Brown, a Vermont-born musician who shared his art and scholarship widely, and by their affection for Greensboro, where Andrew started spending his summers with the Carpenter family on Randolph Road in 1968.
Ray Francis Brown (1897-1964) was born on a small farm in Roxbury, Vermont. After Ray completed his primary education at a one-room schoolhouse (the building, now a residence, stands on Warren Mountain Road), his parents sold their farm and moved to Pittsford, VT, to enable him to attend high school. Ray is believed to have taken mail-order keyboard lessons, and it was in a small Pittsford church that he encountered his first pipe organ.
In the first half of the 1920s, Ray received bachelor’s degrees in both arts and music from Oberlin College and went on to serve as an organ instructor at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. He became director of the Music School at Fisk University in Nashville, where in 1929 he inaugurated the Festival of African-American Music and Fine Arts (now the Spring Arts Festival) and, in 1933, he conducted the Fisk University Choir in its first New York appearance, at Carnegie Hall. Ray spent a year in England studying under Sir Sydney Nicholson, founder of the Royal School of Church Music, before joining the faculty of General Theological Seminary in New York, where he would serve as organist, choirmaster and director of music from 1934 until his death.
In his thirty years at General, Ray taught sacred music to more than 1,000 students preparing to become Episcopal priests and published and lectured extensively on the centrality of music and verse in Christian worship.
He was an influential member of the commission that produced the Hymnal 1940, and his Oxford American Psalter (1949) popularized in this country the singing of canticles and Old Testament psalms set to Anglican chants in the rhythm of natural speech.
In his later years, Ray had a summer home in East Warren, on the opposite side of the Warren-Roxbury mountain from his birthplace, from where he would visit village churches and play their pipe organs. In August, 1963, he performed the last recital of his life on a restored tracker organ, believed to be the oldest in Vermont, at St. Mary’s Church in Northfield.
You can find a memorial to Ray in the stone wall bordering Hardwick Street.