This one, just to let you know now, is a little personal. It is about my dad.
The other day I flew to Nashville, Tenn., to attend a ceremony where he and three other men were inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame, along with Johnny Cash and several others.
I briefly mentioned this in a column, and more people than I can easily count have asked when I planned to explain it more fully. Well, this is it.
It is an amazing thing to sit in an auditorium with hundreds of other people watching your father, gone more than 30 years now, singing in a black-and-white film to a couple sitting in a railroad dining car.
He was the lead singer of the Golden Gate Quartet, a group he formed in the mid-1930s when he was still in high school.
More than a few gospel music historians, they told us that night, consider my father to be one of the greatest gospel singers of the 20th century.
I never knew any of this growing up.
My father died in May 1980. My family walked into this very large church for his funeral, I remember, and every single row was filled.
For my old man?
I still did not understand.
That day, both newspapers in Los Angeles ran long obituaries about my father with photographs. I learned more about him that day than I had over the previous 22 years.
He had been just Dad to us, a man who worked 23 years as a janitor with the school district, who in the 1960s we knew occasionally played Las Vegas, sang in an Elvis movie once or twice, and made a couple of albums with his buddies.
It was only after he died that I discovered the old 78-rpm records he never spoke of, some with his name on them, the 1940s photographs of him and the quartet in tuxedos, singing in Cafe Society in New York where they had headlined along with Lena Horne, Billie Holliday, Big Joe Turner and Sarah Vaughan.
I never knew he sang at the White House, not once but multiple times, and at Constitution Hall during FDR’s inauguration in 1941, making him and the quartet the first black performers to sing there.
Not long ago, I found an old Time magazine story that told of him and the quartet taking a taxi from New York to the Capitol and back for the then-princely sum of $100, presumably not including tip.
He was not long out of the Navy when he met my mother in the late 1940s, after he and his old band had a bad split and he had joined a different quartet. He and the new group were singing in L.A. on the old Amos ‘N Andy radio show, and had been in a couple of movies. That impressed my mom.
The two would go on to have 11 kids, six girls and five boys, one of whom was me.
I think now he quite enjoyed being a normal, work-a-day family man, laboring when I knew him overnight at the post office and at the school by day. I never heard him complain.
I remember the days, maybe a year before he died, when the music historians, recording devices in hand, began knocking on our door. They would sit for hours, talking with Dad.
I remember that last spring when the recording artist Ry Cooder told my father he wanted him to sing with him on his latest album. My dad got out of bed, tried to teach the man what he knew and, for the last time, made another record.
In the fall, Cooder took him back to New York. My father, frail as anything, put on a tuxedo again and sang one more time at Carnegie Hall.
His name was Willie Johnson.
I know now that with all of his previous success, the one thing he truly cherished was his children, all of whom succeeded in their respective fields.
He would be, and this I know too, more than a little embarrassed that I told you any of this.
No, if he were here today, and you were to ask him of his life, I fully believe his kids and their lives would be the first thing out of his mouth.
Congratulations, Dad.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
