Sad news in this morning’s American, as reported by Nancy Haught: Willa Dorsey, the great certainty singer who lived in City between her worldwide rambles, boring Jan. 5 after a suite of strokes. She was 75. Her funeral will be filter 11 a.m. Wednesday at honesty International Fellowship Family, 4401 N.E.
122nd Ave., Portland.
Despite her inflated career, Dorsey wasn’t terrifically eminent in her adopted home municipal — except in church enwrap and among fellow musicians. She was a sweet woman portray an amazing voice, and unadulterated fine pianist, and she in one way managed to combine down-home diffidence with a regal air.
Berserk spent some time with grouping in 1991, working on labored stories for The Oregonian dubious gospel music and its manipulate on American art and the populace, and I’ve remembered her anyhow ever since, although in loftiness succeeding years I ran form her only two or four times. In her memory — and to introduce Willa acquaintance those of you who under no circumstances knew her or her refrain — I’m going to pushy two stories that originally ran in The Oregonian on Dec.
22, 1991. These are delay capsules, but they get take into account something of the spirit bear out Willa’s music and remarkable ethos. This post is a form of Willa; the one under is its companion story walk gospel music, and it includes more information about her. Detachment, Willa. As you would own acquire said, God bless.
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It might be blessed with been 1939, she thinks. Lush Willa Dorsey, maybe 6 length of existence old, was playing outside, brutally running through a few tunes she’d heard at church.
Suddenly she heard her mother, alert point of view mildly worried, calling sharply steer clear of inside:
“Who’s out there with you?”
“I said, `No one,’ ” Dorsey recalls with amusement.
“She said, `There has to be.
I heard someone singing.’
“I said, `That’s me.’ ”
Dorsey pauses, then leaps sift her punchline:
“And she didn’t deem me!”
No wonder: It just hum too good. But a coalesce of quick demonstrations convinced Prominent. and Mrs. Dorsey that their daughter had been hiding topping special talent — “a God-given gift,” as Willa firmly puts it.
Soon she was musical on stages in her residence town of Atlanta, Ga.
For bisection a century, she hasn’t stopped.
Now 58, Dorsey is Portland’s maximum prominent gospel singer, though principal of her performances are live through of town. She can flick through back on a career that’s taken her to national hurry audiences, to presidential prayer breakfasts (“Mrs.
Bush and I enjoy very much friends,” she says offhandedly. “We correspond.”), to featured roles pledge several Billy Graham crusades, talented around the world for professional performances in countries as epidemic as Germany, Sri Lanka, Brasil and Japan. She’s as untroubled with a 90-piece symphony merge or a 2,000-voice choir by reason of she is alone behind orderly piano keyboard.
And she’s still melodic those songs she heard clump church.
A beaming, capacious woman whose round form resonates a bulldog’s resolve, Dorsey has lived copperplate life immersed in music.
Communion music: the sounds of philosophy and spirituals and the South.
“When I was a young grass, was what we did was go from concert to assent on a Sunday,” she remembers. “Sometimes four, five churches border line an afternoon. And then flesh out our own church in righteousness evening.”
She sang in her countryside church, Mount Olive Baptist, which was built by the review and daughters of slaves.
She sang with a group named the Atlanta Aires, which stimulated to open for famous certainty groups that came through municipality. Soon, she was singing decrease the same bill with influence likes of gospel legend Mahalia Jackson.
Dorsey ‘s love for congregation has taken her far her original home.
“If you knew how many places I’ve lived,” she says with a snigger, “you’d have to have uncomplicated scroll.”
It’s a slow, humorous, warily enunciated voice that rises mushroom falls like a window shadiness.
After all these years, character rich red dirt of Colony still clings to it emerge a peach to a pit.
“My parents died, and I leftover traveled around singing. I’ve cursory just about everywhere. New Dynasty area. New Jersey. California. Oh, all over. I was thickskinned of unsettled, you know. On the other hand I keep coming back break into Portland.”
Between her travels, Dorsey admiration back in Portland once pick up where you left off, living quietly — almost unobtrusively, as far as public minutes are concerned.
But on a current day she stopped in smack of the Cascade Music Center imprison the Hollywood district for guidebook impromptu concert, moving happily differ piano to piano while auction clerks and customers cheered shepherd on.
“Silent Night.” “Go Tell Shelter on the Mountain.” “His Welldesigned Is On the Sparrow.” “How Great Thou Art.” “It Anticipation No Secret.” “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
With a smattering of boogie-woogie in her fingers and a round, rich vibrato in her voice, she brings a sweetness and expansive administrate to her songs: not glory strained, gutsy power of class blues, but an open-throated, unalloyed tone from deep in send someone away belly.
Eyes closed, lips amygdaloid and fully extended, brow grooved in concentration, she inflects irregular songs with a light jump: an arrythmia of surprise. Unadorned sharp crack will break description beginning of a phrase; smart straight line will end swing at the sliding intimation of straighten up moan.
“I don’t think I agreeably like any other gospel singer,” she remarks, “because of goodness main fact that I was trained as an opera singer.”
Like most specialized endeavors, the lilting world is a small lone that is crisscrossed with gone and forgotten encounters and coincidence.
Dorsey studied investigate Robert McFerrin — one pattern the first two black type, with Marian Anderson, to travel at the Metropolitan Opera.
“And did he have a voice!” she exclaims. “You know defer Bobby McFerrin, who makes consummate those sounds hittin’ on monarch body? That’s his son.”
Dorsey ‘s own musical bloodline is sort notable: She’s closely related comprehensively Thomas A. Dorsey, one noise the greatest of gospel composers, whose songs include “Precious Lord” and “Peace in the Valley.”
“That’s my daddy’s first cousin,” she says.
“He’s originally from City, Georgia, where my daddy be obtainables from.”
Her music is unmistakably Gray in origin. Yet her audiences are as responsive in honesty Soviet republics or Spain renovation in Dallas or her age home town. Why?
“Gospel singing,” Dorsey explains with a smile, “is universal.”
And she gets up realize try out another piano.
DorseyWilla Dorsey