December 10, 2001
After 50 years, veteran musician still has a song
___By Ken Camp
___Texas Baptist Communications
___In her 50 years as a church organist and pianist, Glenda McDonald has learned thousands of hymns, choruses and anthems. But she has surprisingly little trouble naming her favorite: "He Keeps Me Singing."
___"I've loved it so many years because in my heart and my life, there is a melody. God gave it to me so many years ago," she said.
___Reflecting for a moment on some of the heartaches she has experienced, she added: "And it's stayed there, through everything. I've never lost it."
___McDonald, music associate at Ridglea Baptist Church in Fort Worth, recently celebrated her 13th anniversary as instrumentalist at the church and her 50th anniversary as a church musician.
GLENDA MCDONALD
___Her husband, Rosser, retired a few months ago after 27 years at the Southern Baptist Radio & Television Commission and the North American Mission Board. He scripted a "This is Your Life" program in her honor at Ridglea.
___By any reckoning, hers has been a remarkable life. The ministers with whom she has worked in the last five decades read like a Who's Who of Southern Baptist music leadership: Gene Bartlett, Max Lyall, Buryl Red, Dick Baker, Lanny Allen, Don Blackley and Jim Woodward, to name a few.
___She served with Tim Studstill, now a church music and worship consultant with the Baptist General Convention of Texas, when he was music minister at Ridglea. And she worked both with Dickie Dunn, now a consultant in the BGCT Bible study/discipleship center, and his father, longtime music minister Gale Dunn.
___McDonald has served the last two and a half years with Ridglea Music Minister Scott Reaves. He praises her as "one of those people God has just poured music all over."
___The music was poured on early, and from several directions. Her father, who had no formal musical training, taught her how to play four chords on the piano. That served her well when she began to "doodle around on the piano" with her bluegrass fiddle-playing maternal grandfather and to play gospel music in summer camp meetings with her paternal grandfather, a Freewill Baptist preacher.
___"My grandfather would just plop me down on the piano bench and say, 'All right, Glennalou, time for you to play and sing,'" she recalled.
___When her family moved to the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, she studied classical piano with a teacher in North Dallas--riding the trolley and bus to lessons three times a week for nearly three years.
___Balancing that classical training with a dose of Southern Gospel, at age 12 she attended the Stamps-Baxter music school in Dallas with an aunt--even though she technically was too young to be a student.
___Her family moved back to Oklahoma, and at age 15 she became church pianist at First Baptist Church of Seminole. She also served on occasion as organist--a role she has filled in numerous churches, even though she never has had any formal instruction on that instrument.
___She served as pianist and organist in several Oklahoma Baptist churches and at Falls Creek Baptist Assembly. Then her husband accepted a job with WFAA-TV in Dallas, and the McDonalds moved to North Texas.
___She began a five-year stint as church organist and youth choir pianist at Richardson Heights Baptist Church. While she was there, she perfected what close associates came to call the "prayertime dash"--slipping away from the organ during a prayer and rushing to the other side of the sanctuary during a prayer in order to play the piano for a choir or soloist.
___At Richardson Heights, that involved kicking off her shoes at the organ, climbing down a few stairs, sprinting through two rooms behind the choir loft, and then running up a few more steps to the piano.
___"I was scared to death I was going to fall or crash into a chair," she said. McDonald recalls one day when she caught the sleeve of her choir robe on the strike plate of a door. "It shredded that robe sleeve, but it didn't slow me down."
___The prayertime dash came to an end during her time at Fort Worth's Birchman Baptist Church, when music minister Phil Jones secured a piano for her that was placed next to the organ. She served at Birchman 12 years.
___After a couple of years as assistant organist and occasional pianist at Travis Avenue Baptist Church, she and her family moved to Ridglea Baptist. "I remember saying, 'If you can't get anybody else to play for you, I'll do it until you find somebody.' That was 13 years ago, and I'm still at it," she said.
___Until she had reconstructive surgery on her right hand a few months ago, few people knew McDonald was playing with pain. The cartilage at the joints at the base of her thumbs was gone. Years of playing had worn it away.
___Since a cyst developed on her right wrist, that hand is still not free from pain. She anticipates having surgery on her left hand sometime within the next few months, and she admits to being somewhat apprehensive about it.
___But when she is seated on a piano bench, her hands flowing gracefully up and down the keyboard, quietly singing a beloved hymn, she is transported to another place. There she is far from the pain. That is where she meets God.
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