That's exactly what Burns Davis was.
Was rather than is.
The Monday before last month's Great Plains Ragtime Society meeting (held 9-25-2011), I'd sent the massage therapist from Lincoln, NE a copy of a flyer touting that September meeting. And it was all about trying to get more Lincolnites interested in traveling those 52 miles to Omaha to check out what GPRS has been doing to help promote old-time piano.
I was eleven days too late.
I received an email from Nan Bostick; she'd written to find out if I'd heard about what happened to Burns.
Opened up the link Nan sent with that email and found out...the unthinkable happened.
Burns Smith Davis passed away on 9-8-2011.
It happened- unexpectedly- at home. (She would've turned 64 on 11-13-2011.)
I found out that Burns wasn't actually her birth name. She was born Bonnie Jill Reimer...and the birth took place in Enid, OK. (The proud parents were Barney J. and Martha Louise Smith Reimer.) Burns went on to take her first and last names from a couple of highly influential piano teachers of hers.
In 1968, Burns received a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Oklahoma...where she went on to, in 1972, earn a master's degree in literary science.
In previous posts, I'd called Burns a Californian-turned-Nebraskan. Actually, she was an Oklahoman-turned-Arkansan-turned-Washingtonian-turned-Californian-turned-Nebraskan. (Fresh out of college, BSD held down library jobs in Fayetteville, AR; Yakima, WA; and Red Bluff, CA. In Yakima, Burns went back to college...and got another master's degree, this time in botany.)
Burns Davis moved from Red Bluff to another California city, Cupertino, where she became a nursing home administrator.
In addition, she became a ragtime enthusiast there...to the point where she became active with a rag group and a local festival.
Her next city was Los Gatos, CA...where she got involved in business consulting and design.
And then, in the middle 1990s, Burns came to Nebraska's capital city; in Lincoln, she joined the State Library Commission. On top of that, she launched Davis Business Systems.
The Star City was the place in which Burns' life reached a real turning point.
In 1998, Burns decided to become a massage therapist...so, she enrolled at the city's Myotherapy Institute.
And that's where people found out that she had The Knack.
Not long after studying at the institute, BSD started her own massage therapy business, Ehaweh Arts. (The firm's name came from one of Burns' great-grandmothers, an Oklahoman known for her own ability to heal.)
Meanwhile, Burns began to land jobs as a substitute organist at a succession of Lincoln churches: St. Mark's Episcopal, St. David's Episcopal, St. Paul's United Methodist, St. Paul's Congregational, and Trinity United Methodist. (At Trinity, Burns served a while as its main organist.)
She even went back to Enid to attend Phillips University...and to intern on the organ at that city's Central Christian Church. The high point was a concert in June 2000.
Five years and one month later, I met Burns Davis for the first time.
And it wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for Gil Lieberknecht.
Gil gave me a list of performers he'd been playing alongside at different ragtime get-togethers nationwide (especially the Sutter Creek outing in his- and Nan's- native California). The list came in handy, because I was trying to find performers for the first annual Ragtime to Riches Festival, then held at a church in Council Bluffs, Broadway United Methodist.
Jim Radloff was on that list, too...and he and Burns answered the call. (So did two other performers I'd competed alongside at the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest: Marty Mincer and "Perfessor" Bill Edwards.)
Burns went on to play every last one of the R to R Festivals we've had thus far, from the first (where Gil was the guest of honor) to this year's event (the first held at Omaha's First Central Congregational Church).
She ended up doing the last Sunday concert at every R to R only because her Ehaweh Arts schedule and her work as a church organist in the Star City combined to leave her with the last Sunday concert...but last year and this, Burns got R to R Sunday (at least the afternoon part) off.
In fact, at the 2010 festival, Burns gave a workshop about Gil, the highly-prolific ragtime composer who moved, as a teen, to Nebraska in 1947 (his dad Henry was born here) and died in 2008 at age 76.
And it was one heck of a workshop! (In fact, Burns' tribute to her old buddy- of "Goldenrod Rag" fame- was the workshop I could only hope to do about the man nicknamed "Gil Lieby.")
Burns' 2010 R to R workshop had the same thing her festival concerts had: A kind of quiet elegance that featured Burns' wit (who else would list CDs as some of her musical instruments?) and great analytical intelligence.
By the way, she was no slouch as a singer. In fact, one of her Ragtime to Riches concerts began with BSD singing and playing "Everybody Rag with Me." (Earlier this year, Burns- a new convert to Judaism- became a cantorial soloist. All of that after membership in the St. Mark's Episcopal choir.)
Massage therapist...librarian...business consultant...instrumentalist...singer...animal lover...ragtime enthusiast...Burns Smith Davis was no slouch as a person.
Burns, I'm glad to have met you.
Well, the lone workshop at the 2011 Ragtime to Riches Festival went fine.
The next measuring stick for the festival happened immediately afterwards...and that stick was the first of two concerts at this year's event at Omaha's First Central Congregational United Church of Christ.
And I felt really at home up there...really comfortable.
I started my one-hour set with 1899's "Tickled to Death," written by Charles Hunter (a man who also went by the name Robert Hampton). That number got included because I felt lucky that the folks at First Central UCC came to R to R's rescue.
"Tickled to Death" was also the first competition piece I ever heard at Illinois' World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest. I started going to that event in 1993, when it was held at the then Holiday Inn in Decatur, IL; that year, thirteen-year-old Julie Ann Smith (who was still living in and going to school in her home town of Hastings, NE) got the competition going by playing "Tickled to Death." (Julie Ann grew up to become one of the world's top classical harpists.)
Julie Ann...thanks for getting me interested in learning "Tickled to Death!"
Wanted to get in a tune that marked a first of some kind, so I followed "TTD" with Bob Cole's 1906 biggie, "Under the Bamboo Tree." (Bob was one of the first African-American songwriters in Tin Pan Alley history...and one of the first to hit it big in that Alley.)
This time, I felt comfortable enough to do five rags in my eleven-song set (including "Funny Folks," the 1914 W.C. Polla rag I botched up at the 2009 OTPP Contest- the last time I'd been able to make it to the Hotel Pere Marquette in Peoria, IL, OTPP's current home).
When I put together a set, I like to get topical...so this time, I managed to get a dig in on two now former US representatives from New York- Chris Lee (R) and Anthony Weiner (D). (Okay...I dedicated one of Irving Berlin's first songs to the two ex-lawmakers. The song was..."Telling Lies," a 1910 number where Irving's words were set to Henriette Blanke-Belcher's music.)
And since I had the local weather and the flooding taking place along the Missouri River on my mind, I added Nellie Stokes' 1906 rag, "Snowball."
Well, it was all that snow in North Dakota that triggered the flooding along the Mighty Mo.
NCAA baseball's Division 1 World Series had wrapped up (South Carolina won it again, this time sweeping Florida)...and that's why Scott Joplin's "The Easy Winners" (from 1901) and a 1915 novelty from Ray Sherwood and Bert Rule, "I'm Goin' Back to Old Nebraska (Goodbye)," got in there.
And I closed it all out with "Golden Slippers," James Bland's 1853 winner that they used to play all the time on Gunsmoke. (A month before this year's R to R, James Arness died...a year after his younger brother Peter Graves passed away.)
Well, that was it...and Burns Davis picked up the baton and took R to R 7.0 home.
This time, Burns came up with a five-part concert, "From There to Here;" in it, the Californian-turned-Nebraskan spotlighted rags that contrast changes and reflect similarities in rag styles.
Burns (she's a massage therapist in Lincoln when she isn't playing piano or organ) kicked her set off with folk rags, topping it all off with 2000's "Sutter Creek Strut," the final rag written by another Golden Stater-turned-Cornhusker Stater, the late Gil Lieby (who died two years before Peter Graves did).
Dance rags were next up to bat...and they included, if I remember right, Joseph Lamb's final composition, 1960's "Ragtime Bobolink."
Burns' elegant style of playing continued on in the third segment of "From There to Here;" this segment consisted of three marches/two-steps, led off by Scott Joplin's 1908 "Pine Apple Rag."
Then it was rags based on blues. Two of the four such tunes that made it into Burns' concert were Kathi Backus' 1985 "Omaha Blues" (you don't have to be a Nebraskan to love it) and a number that David Thomas Roberts wrote five years later, "Roberto Clemente." (That one's one of the most poignant rags ever devised...and you don't have to be a baseball fan to appreciate this most famous of all the rags David's come up with.)
The last four rags put over in this year's festival fall into the category Burns called "Band Shell, Bring on the Brass Band, Rags."
Lincoln's massage therapist-church organist-ragtimer started this subset with another 1908 tune, May Aufderheide's "The Richmond Rag." (Me, I'm still working on getting the hang of that one!) The next number, Max Morath's rousing "The Vindicator Rag," also stood out...as did the last song in R to R 7.0, the piece that put rags on the map for good.
Nope...not "The Entertainer."
It was "Maple Leaf Rag."
One of the things the audience enjoyed about Burns Davis' concert was how she, from time to time, passed around the sheet music she was playing from. Because of that, we got a chance to see exactly what the composers were out to convey when they put these selections together...especially the effects the Scotts and Josephs and Mays and Maxes built into their rags.
Speaking of built...this time, Burns and I had two pianos to choose from: A Mason & Hamlin grand from the 1920s and an Anderson & Newton upright from, I'm guessing, the turn of the 20th Century (if not the 1890s).
Instead of clashing, the two pianos were in tune with each other. Matter of fact, the A&N upright turned out to be the hit of the festival...at least that's what one of the audience members told me.
The secret was...well, after the workshop about Maceo Pinkard ended, all the talk about Tin Pan Alley gave me the idea of sticking a thumb tack into each of the upright's hammers for that tinny sound. (Don't worry...all the tacks got removed from the Van Wert, OH-built piano before the church emptied out.)
The next day, I made it over to the Omaha Street School and handed staff member Tami Saunders the R to R proceeds- $100. (Man, the staff was happy to get the dough!)
And I'm happy that we were able to pull off a festival that had to find a replacement venue FAST.
On top of that, I can't wait 'til we get to do it all over again in 2012...and I hope you can join us.
