This is the week all church choirs—pros and shaky amateurs alike—tackle cantatas. The most popular new one is probably “The Wonder of Christmas,” penned by a man who has sold one million copies of ten cantatas.
In 1957, John W. Peterson was known only as a writer of hymns and gospel songs, but “without really knowing how” turned out his first cantata, “Hallelujah, What a Savior,” in a month. Since then, twenty-live to fifty fan letters a week have poured in, including one from the superiors at a Michigan convent who “adjusted” the text.
Viewing his career from this popularity crest, Peterson finds even the setbacks—a ruined vocation, wartime piloting in Burma, foodless days in college, the rise of Elvis Presley—were guidance from God. He’s now forty-two but looks about thirty-five, an effect enhanced by a tall, trim figure, dark hair, and an almost boyish face with a ready grin.
The Petersons are spending their first Christmas in Grand Rapids, where he recently moved to steer the renascent Singspiration, a gospel music house with a mercurial past. With the composer are his serene wife, Marie, and three daughters who reflect her dark Syrian beauty: Pamela, 13; Candace Kay, 15; and Sandra Lynn, 18, back from Moody Bible Institute. Their handsome L-shaped ranch house might lack furniture and rugs at the moment, but because of its newness, not lack of finances. There’s a white Imperial in the garage, too, but one day fifteen years ago, when he also was at Moody, Peterson didn’t even have twelve cents to ride Chicago’s Lake Street el.
In analyzing this cantata-based prosperity, Peterson listed pitfalls he has tried to avoid: “Most cantatas are disjointed. The choir has a number, then everything stops while the soprano wails through a solo, then another break,” he said, slicing the air with his hands. “I try to weave it together as one big package of music.”
As thread, he uses modulations between sections instead of abrupt key changes, Scripture narration, and a recurring song theme. But this may be the key to popularity: “Because I’m basically a writer of melody, I always use some sweeping, lyrical melodies which will be fun for the choir to sing.”
He throws in just enough modern harmony “to make it interesting” but eschews a highbrow style which he contends would “ruin my message” and “only sell to 10 per cent of the city churches.” His musical credo is that “you can become too musical.… I’m not primarily interested in raising musical standards.… I don’t want music to get in the way, but to carry a message.”
A man who prefers music’s middle of the road, Peterson was born on a Lindsborg, Kansas, farm, the youngest of seven in a Swedish-American family. He was four when his father died, after the family had moved to nearby Salina.
When John was a boy soprano, a Major Bowes team came to town. He won the local talent contest and chimed in on three shows. As a result of this exposure, a voice teacher gave him free lessons for many years, and KFBI put him on the air weekly as the folksy “Singing Farm Boy.”
At twelve, Peterson said, he received Christ as his Saviour, but in high school “the Lord really got ahold of my life.” He began to read voraciously from Christian books and became active in local evangelism, a course which ruined a youthful dream:
“My one passion was to be an opera singer,” he recalls. “After my voice changed, I still had a good tenor voice and even a group of fans. But I started so young as a church songleader and did so many campaigns and meetings it ruined my voice.”
As a high school senior, he added a tune to a previously written poem—his usual method even now. “After that one song, there was a fire in my soul, and it’s been there ever since.” He wrote a lot, scrapped most of it, bombarded publishers with the rest. Then in 1940, while guitar-strumming around the countryside in one-night meetings with his brothers’ “Norse Gospel Trio,” he sold “Yet There Is Room.” The thrill of that first $8 check was blunted by the publication, which credited “John W. Patterson.”
Being on the road so many Sundays, Peterson lost touch with his home Swedish (now Evangelical) Covenant church and has since worshiped with all sorts of Protestants, often in independent Bible churches. However, he has been a Baptist for much of the past decade.
The daily touring grind permanently lowered the pitch and quality of John’s voice but led to a life partnership. His future wife, an acquaintance in high school, became a radio fan, came to hear him at a tent meeting, and became a Christian. (Her family had been nominally identified with Eastern Orthodoxy.) They married several years later, while he was in the service.
During the war, Peterson was a troop supply pilot in the Himalayas. Cruising fiercely alone into florid sunrises, gazing up at endless stars and down at massive peaks, he realized anew “what a tremendous universe this is.” Often he worshiped right in the cockpit or sketched song ideas on the back of his flight plan.
One sketch later became his first big hit while he was a post-war student at Moody: “It took a miracle to put the stars in place; It took a miracle to hang the world in space.…” When Percy Crawford was on campus, he bought it and eleven other songs from the aspiring writer. Crawford later sold the rights to a New York publisher, Hill and Range Songs, which had the song framed as one of its all-time best money-makers. For each of the dozen songs, Peterson got $3.
But he had a daughter and wife to support, and “I really needed that $36 that week,” he said.
After Moody, he almost entered Northern Baptist Seminary, but prayer led him instead to get a bachelor of music degree at the American Conservatory in Chicago, majoring in theory and composition—a course he had dropped after a week in high school. His composition teacher. Erwin Fisher, tried vainly to steer him into highbrow orchestral writing.
From graduation until 1955, he worked for Moody’s WMBI. One song from that period, “Over the Sunset Mountain,” was so popular that a commercial publisher offered a fat price for it if he would “broaden” the last line from “Jesus my Savior I’ll see.”
That temptation didn’t last long, but the lure was stronger after he moved to Montrose, Pennsylvania, and his first full-time writing job with Singspiration and its founder, Al Smith. A year later, Hill and Range Songs, mindful of the success of “It Took a Miracle” and of the Hit Parade popularity then of “inspirational” songs, got Peterson into its plush office. There it offered him big promotions and recordings on name labels with stars like Eddie Fisher, and handed him $2,500 as a teaser. He signed a contract.
Then, overnight, rock ‘n’ roll swept the country, and Hill and Range poured its interests into the fad. Peterson had a chance to rethink the deal and decided against it.
“What is the music of America?” he asked. “The ones who hit the majority of people are Rodgers, Gershwin, Porter—you can’t get around it.” One of his unfulfilled goals is to write his own musical, with a Christian message in it, using a non-biblical story with the typical boy-meets-girl angle and colorful format.
Interested librettoists will be able to reach him in a few weeks at a brand-new Singspiration plant in Grand Rapids, where he owns the company along with the Zondervan brothers of book-publishing fame.
The Ncc Election
Bishop Reuben H. Mueller, ranking clergyman of the Evangelical United Brethren Church, was elected to a three-year term as president of the National Council of Churches. He was named at the NCC’s sixth General Assembly in Philadelphia.
Mueller, 66, is the presiding bishop of his 748,000-member denomination and has served since 1957 as chairman of the NCC’s Division of Christian Education. He is also a member of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches.
Fulfillment Of A Forecast
A prophecy came true in Toronto last month when the Rev. Kenn W. Opperman began his ministry at the Avenue Road Church of the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
The prophecy dates back to 1943 when Opperman, then eighteen, first visited the church to give a Christian testimony. He had been converted just four days before, and a devout Christian woman at the testimony meeting predicted that he would some day be the church’s pastor.
The Avenue Road Church was enjoying amazing popularity in evangelism at that time under a youthful, handsome minister—Charles Templeton. As a sports cartoonist-turned-evangelist, Templeton was a phenomenon, especially among young people. Starting with an empty church scheduled for demolition, he soon headed a prosperous congregation which saw many answers to its prayers. Finances were met in the toughest times—even after a disastrous fire which gutted the church the night before the dedication of its newly renovated quarters.
Templeton and his wife were also gifted vocalists, and he went on to become a leading figure in Youth for Christ.
Subsequently he left for Princeton Theological Seminary, and under his urging the until-then independent Avenue Road Church joined the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1949.
Templeton became then a Presbyterian evangelist in the United States. But at the peak of his church career he left the ministry. He went on to secular work and today is one of Canada’s leading television personalities.
Meanwhile, Opperman studied at Canadian Bible College in Regina, Saskatchewan, spent four years as a pastor, and served several more as a missionary in Peru. Some began to see in him the earmarks of a missionary statesman. His last venture before assuming the pulpit at the Avenue Road Church (succeeding the late A. W. Tozer) was a world tour of mission fields.
The prophecy of Opperman’s appointment was well known to Templeton: the woman who made it was his mother.
KENNETH G. WARES
