This post is part of the Poured Forth Blog Post Series: 1 2 [3] 4 5 6 7 8 9
Poured Forth is also available as a book: Poured Forth
I studied music composition and music theory at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. One day my main professor received a request for help with a local music-related project, and he decided to pass it along to me as a learning opportunity.
And so I found myself in the late spring of 1996 driving to the home of one Frances Marion Allen with the promise of earning $15 per hour to help with some sort of music project. Her house was in Fairmount, a historic district of large, “old money” houses near downtown Fort Worth. Finding the 1910s-vintage house, I walked up the driveway, pulled open the external, screened storm door, and cautiously knocked.
After a few moments of awkwardly wondering whether I had the correct address, the door opened, and I was greeted by an 88-year-old woman who introduced herself as “Miss Allen.” (I learned soon enough that nobody would dare call her “Frances.”) Miss Allen invited me into her house and into a world I couldn’t have imagined.
The house was dim inside, dusty and overflowing with evidence of a life lived well and a life well-lived. Everywhere I looked there were shimmering momentos, papers, artwork, lace table coverings, framed diplomas and certificates and tables full of faded postcards and Asian statuettes and jeweled music boxes with rich colors. There was a fireplace—or fireplaces?—and thick-padded furniture with velvet, richly-colored upholstery. I struggled to absorb the intensity of it all in the dim sunlight that slipped through here and there past the old curtains. Those curtains were elegant and expensive once, I thought.
I was left with very little time to process all of this. Miss Allen was already walking ahead of me straight through the spacious front entry parlor and into the back of the house. She was not moving quickly, but I realized she was not a woman that expected to wait for anyone. I imagined she walked quite fast when she was younger. Remembering my place, and really wanting to secure her goodwill and the $15 per hour, I followed her obediently and quickly to the back sitting room.
Miss Allen motioned me to sit down in a chair across from her beside a heavy, dark wood table that was overflowing with stacks of papers. Then she began an extraordinary tale. Some of the details came out in bits and pieces over months to come, but in the end, this was her story:1
Miss Allen’s mother, Dr. Daisy Emery, graduated from Fort Worth Medical College in 1897 at the age of 21, the first woman to graduate from any medical school in Texas. She married Dr. Walter Allen, a former schoolmate. The couple had two daughters, Frances Marion Allen (“Miss Allen”), born in 1908, and Sheila Emery Allen, born in 1911. Walter and Daisy invested their earnings from medicine, and soon the family had substantial land and oil holdings.
The Allen sisters never married and lived most of their years in their mother’s home (in which I now sat to hear the story). Miss Allen pursued a career in social work; she told us tales of being attacked in prohibition-era Chicago and of once meeting Al Capone. Miss Allen’s sister, Sheila Emery Allen, earned a Master of Music from North Texas State Teachers College (now The University of North Texas in Denton), and taught in the Fort Worth public school system from 1935 until 1965.
At this point in the story, Miss Allen waved toward the piles of papers on the oak table beside us and said, “Before she died, my sister Sheila made me promise her that I would get her music transcribed and published.” The papers, it seemed, were in fact music manuscripts: stacks and stacks of handwritten scores including many art songs as well as pieces for choir, piano, and chamber groups.
As she neared death in 1992 at the age of 81, Sheila Allen had made her sister Frances Allen promise to take care of her life’s creative work. For four years, Miss Allen had been struggling to find a way to do just that, and now she wanted me to help.
Overwhelmed, I tried to explain to Miss Allen that I did not know how we could get all of these compositions published. In those days (before the Internet), there was no viable path to self-publish your works, and I had no connections with “real” publishers. Urged on by her own sense of mortality and the deathbed promise she made to her sister, Miss Allen would not be deterred.
And so, while I continued writing my own compositions for my undergraduate music degree at TCU, my spare hours became dedicated to the creative world of Sheila Emery Allen. I felt an urgency about the work. Frances Allen’s days were numbered, and I wanted to help her honor her promise to her sister.
More than that, though, I wanted to help Sheila’s musical vision live on. In truth, she was not one of the “great” composers, but she was a good composer. Regardless, she had a unique voice, and her personality and experiences shone through in her music. The list of compositions that Miss Allen eventually found for me amongst the papers spanned the years 1932 to 1988—in all, fifty-six years of work.
Sheila wrote an interesting piece for soprano, flute, and piano in 1969, inspired by Neil Armstrong’s moon landing (Moon Walk). There was a piano suite about a visit she made to Soviet Russia from 1970; patriotic compositions for the 1976 bicentennial; pieces and poems about breezes, butterflies, and mockingbirds; art songs inspired by Texas culture; and even hymns. In all, there were several hundred pages of manuscript for me to sift through and edit.
Sadly, in February of 1997, less than a year after we met her, Miss Allen died. Although I finished typesetting eight of Sheila’s compositions and was in the middle of a ninth, the evaluations by critics and publishing that Miss Allen envisioned never happened. Instead, I was contacted by the executor of the estate (a bank officer) who told me to finish the ninth piece and report to a bank trust office to be paid.
That meeting with the bank officer was one I will never forget, and it is the reason I tell this story. I remember vividly the elegant floor-to-ceiling wood panelling of the waiting area. I remember being called back to a man at a desk who seemed to have too much work to do. He asked me for my invoice, the manuscripts, and the engraved music, which I handed to him. He looked it all over unemotionally for a moment, then pulled out a checkbook and wrote me a check for the amount due on the invoice. As I left the office, I saw him nonchalantly throwing the score and manuscript into a big box on the floor next to his desk.
I never saw that music again—and neither have you. Frances Allen did make sure that some of the important historical documents from her family were preserved (you can find them online). But I suspect that all the work I did and all the pages and pages of Sheila Allen’s handwritten manuscripts ended up thrown out, deemed of no value.
This was a sobering lesson for me. I imagined Sheila, toiling countless hours over more than fifty years, going to her piano again and again and again to craft her music. I imagined her puzzling over this or that phrase, erasing, reworking, perfecting each note. I could almost hear her rehearsing with the performers, her skilled hands joyfully gliding across the piano keys. And then, after decades of effort and emotion and art, it all ended with some bank officer tossing it absentmindedly into a box and moving on to the next estate item.
What if that were my music or poetry or book? What if it were yours?
Actually, there is one copy of the Sheila Allen scores I engraved. I kept one copy of the project for myself, and I used it to do a student academic presentation about Sheila’s music at the 1998 College Music Society South Central meeting at the University of North Texas. Aside from that brief glimmer, Sheila’s music is gone—and I cannot share it with you because it is under copyright.
Despite what her sister Miss Allen believed, works are automatically copyrighted in the United States immediately upon completion. Since Frances Allen had no heirs, her estate (and presumably Sheila’s copyrights) went mainly to the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Even if I did find the scores, and even if I could ask their permission for the copyright, who at a busy medical school would care about Sheila’s music?
I do not tell these stories to slander Sheila Allen or Frances Allen. In fact, they ended up giving generously to charities in their estate plans (I once wasted an afternoon looking it all up online). My point is this: neither of them fully appreciated the brevity of life. Seeing Sheila Allen’s creative work carelessly thrown into a box in a bank office left me unsure what my own path should be.
Interlude 1: Keith Green and Rich Mullins
Singer-songwriter Keith Green (1953–1982) began life as a childhood music sensation, but soon began to use drugs and explore Eastern mysticism. He married Melody Steiner at the age of 20, and two years later Keith and Melody became followers of Jesus. Initially Keith pursued the usual Christian music path: he signed a recording contract with Sparrow Records in 1976 and began touring and selling records.
According to his wife Melody, Keith began to feel strongly that the gospel should be free. Keith felt God wanted him to follow Matthew 10:8: “Freely you have received; Freely give” (Berean Standard Bible). Keith believed he should not deny ministry to anyone because of money—whether that ministry took the form of a music recording, a gospel tract, or a concert. So starting with a performance in Tulsa at Oral Roberts University in March 1979, Keith and Melody began paying for all the concert expenses personally, and Keith stopped taking offerings at his meetings.2
Keith’s thinking continued to evolve. By August 1979, Keith began planning for his third album, So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt. They had already stopped charging for concerts, but his records and tapes were still being sold across the country. Keith decided that although these recordings could probably be considered “products,” since his motives for doing them were ministry, he should make a way for people to get them regardless of money.3 In other words, Keith concluded that if he thought of his music as ministry, it should not be sold.
At Keith’s request, Sparrow Records released him from his contract, and Keith and Melody decided to give 25,000 copies of the album away by mortgaging their house to do it. Keith felt that they had to do this even if no donations came in to offset the costs so that he would know he had “obeyed the Lord.”4
May 1980 came, and Keith put the new album policy into effect. According to his wife Melody, Keith always kept the record tables covered until the end of the evening’s ministry, because he didn’t like the commercial feeling it gave to sell things before the concert started.5 After the altar call, Keith announced they would not be selling his records or setting a price. Instead, people could give whatever they wanted or even nothing if they had no money.
This first attempt was a bit of a disaster. Melody recounts that people started scooping up handfuls of albums and pushed the table so hard that she was “pinned between the wall and the record table.”6 They later refined the policy to limit free albums to one per household and encouraged people to give something if they could.
Keith was passionate about decommercializing ministry. He once confronted a gathering of the Fellowship of Contemporary Christian Ministries (FCCM), a group of artists, promoters, producers, and record company representatives. Keith began his argument by stating that ticket prices were “a nail in Jesus’ hand”7 since people who didn’t follow Jesus knew they shouldn’t have to pay to hear about Him. Keith distinguished between a man’s job or skill and his ministry gift. He next cited Paul, who made tents for a living so he could give the gospel for free.
Then Keith quoted 1 Corinthians 9:18, which in the Berean Standard Bible reads “What then is my reward? That in preaching the gospel I may offer it free of charge, and so not use up my rights in preaching it.” Needless to say, all of this did not go over very well in the group.
In the summer of 1982, Loren Cunnningham (the founder of Youth With a Mission) and Keith Green made plans to tour together to raise up 100,000 missionaries,8 but Keith died in a tragic plane crash on July 28, 1982. Crushed by grief, his wife Melody was led to John 12:24: “Truly, truly, I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a seed. But if it dies, it bears much fruit” (Berean Standard Bible).9
Miraculously, around the world in Japan, Loren Cunningham was led to the very same scripture passage when he first heard of Keith’s death,10 and it came true in abundance. Many young people committed to serve the Lord in a more serious way, including many that moved overseas to serve with Youth With A Mission. Melody Green led their Last Days Ministries to reach countless people. And Keith’s music and his passion for purity and wholehearted devotion continue to speak and minister today.
Singer-songwriter Rich Mullins (1955-1997) grew up in Indiana before moving to Cincinnati in order to attend Cincinnati Bible College. His music became famous when Amy Grant decided to include his song “Sing Your Praise to the Lord” on her album Age to Age. Amy Grant, describing what it was like to tour with him, said that “other artists would watch him from the side of the stage.”11 Michael W. Smith said that there’s “nobody who wrote songs like Rich.”12
God gifted Mullins in astounding ways. Steve Cudworth, who wrote “If I Stand” with him, relates the story that Rich Mullins wrote “Awesome God” in his head while driving to a conference. According to Cudworth, Rich said that he felt like he was just hearing the song instead of writing it.13 The music, it seems, was a free gift from God.
Perhaps Mullins is most famous for his troubled relationship with corporate music and financial success. Partly to avoid the corporate feel of Nashville, he moved to Wichita, Kansas and went back to school to get a music degree, hoping to teach children music on a reservation.
Although Mullins kept his work under copyright, he chose to give away all the earnings beyond a living wage. Mullins never came to peace entirely with the financial side of his success. He asked his CPA, Jim Dunning, to establish a company that would pay Rich an average American’s salary and give all the remaining earnings to help the children of the reservation.14
Rich Mullins was killed in a tragic car accident on September 19, 1997.
This post is part of the Poured Forth Blog Post Series: 1 2 [3] 4 5 6 7 8 9
Poured Forth is also available as a book: Poured Forth
Footnotes:
- I have streamlined this “TCU tale” a bit for readability. In addition to my notes, I consulted Daisy Emery Allen, M.D., 1876–1958: Scholarship and Loan Funds (brochure, University of Texas Medical Branch, Office of University Relations), 1993(?) and Judith N. McArthur, “Allen, Frances Daisy Emery,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed December 18, 2024, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/allen-frances-daisy-emery. ↩︎
- Melody Green and David Hazard, No Compromise. The Life Story of Keith Green (Sparrow Press, 1989), 186. ↩︎
- Green and Hazard, 218. ↩︎
- Green and Hazard, 221. ↩︎
- Green and Hazard, 227. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Green and Hazard, 233. ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Green and Hazard, 263. ↩︎
- Green and Hazard, 279. ↩︎
- David Leo Shultz, Director. Rich Mullins: A Ragamuffin’s Legacy (Bridgestone Multimedia Group, 2015), Amazon Prime, https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Mullins-Ragamuffins-Shane-Claiborne/dp/B0719C4KWH/ , 39:00. ↩︎
- Shultz, 41:02. ↩︎
- Shultz, 54:01. ↩︎
- Shultz, 1:07:25. ↩︎
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