Chicago high school choir alums embrace lessons, memories of beloved teacher: Mr. Duncan's disciples

Five decades after Wendell Phillips High School’s a capella choir wowed audiences from Bronzeville to Germany, the singers continue to heed their beloved director’s plea:

Promise me you’ll stay together even after I’m gone.

They credit Mr. Andrew Duncan’s skill and kindness, bolstered by local donors, with shepherding their teenage selves to an international choir festival in Europe.

To the pinnacle of Chicago school choral competitions.

To a slew of receptions at the regular behest of Mayor Richard J. Daley.

Onto Chicago radio and TV stations.

And memorialized on three vinyl records, where their gospel and holiday classics live on.

A smattering of the singers, now graying and grandparents, have kept following Mr. Duncan’s gentle direction for so long since their high school years in Bronzeville.

“It was Mr. Duncan who made me feel like there was a purpose for me,” says Sharon Lawson (Wendell Phillips High School class of 1973). “He taught me discipline, dependability, reliability, responsibility. I'm pretty sure all of us feel the same way — that he gave us that support and security and acknowledgment that we were and we are all special, we all have a purpose. And I'm just so happy to have been a part of it.”

Lawson, 70, was in the first carload of grads who, long after graduation, showed up at Mr. Duncan’s home starting in 1992 when he was mistakenly rumored to have fallen ill.

That evolved into an annual visit that continues each August, when many classes of former Phillips a capella choir singers meld into an alumni choir.

“It's joy,” says Earlene Williams (WPHS 1972). “And that's what we get when we get together, such a joyous feeling though, of closeness, meeting together.”

When they sing, they start the same way, with his favorite hymn: “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.”

It didn’t matter the year or the surrounding grandeur, be it a local church, their third LP recorded on tour in Europe in 1970 or in the Duncans’ back yard in 2022, months shy of Mr. Duncan’s 90th birthday.

That was the last time Mr. Duncan conducted his choir.

“We were talking about how he and I would battle over, I didn’t want to play” piano, says Emily Guss (WPHS 1972), so shy in high school she didn’t want to stand out. “And he said, ‘But I knew you could do it.’ And it brought tears because I was like, 'I didn't have the confidence.' And all this time, this is 50 years later, he believed something I didn't see.”

Future stars helped tradition grow

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Phillips’ a capella choir used to win citywide competitions year after year, cutting records, attracting invitations from out of state and overseas. Not to anyone familiar with Bronzeville history — certainly not to anybody who grew up there.

The city’s first all-Black high school used to enroll thousands of kids from the surrounding swath of city blocks around Pershing and Prairie. The neighborhood, a destination for those who moved north in the Great Migration, evolved into a Black cultural center. Nearby was Pilgrim Baptist Church, celebrated as the birthplace of gospel music.

There was a “rich music tradition” within the columned brick building, says Gertrude Jackson Hill (WPHS 1965), who spent all four years in the a capella choir and now heads the alumni Hall of Fame. “You still have people like Nat ‘King’ Cole, Dinah Washington, Sam Cooke and Pops Staples of the Staple Singers. They honed their skills at Phillips High School and went off.”

The youngest of 13 children raised at 26th and Prairie, Jackson Hill was one of 4,000 students who filled Phillips to bursting, thanks to big families like hers and housing projects that since have been razed. Fewer than 400 students are enrolled now.

The fat 1965 yearbook belonging to Trudy Jackson was typical of the time, showing off dance troupes, a wood shop, stage plays. The music department included Andrew Duncan, hired in 1958 after getting his college degree in music education in his native Pennsylvania and playing trombone in an Army band.

No one seems to know what drew Mr. Duncan to Phillips. But he soon revealed grand ambitions for his crew who went to school “in the ghetto,” as he wrote in concert programs. He wanted eight-part harmonies in “John Saw The Number.” Songs in languages none of the singers understood, like “Adoramus Te” and “O Magnum Mysterium” in Latin, “Las Agachadas” in Spanish.

Aside from Christmas standards and a few spiritual staples, the repertoire changed each year, growing more complex.

“We weren't just one of the best choirs in the city; we were one of the best in the state,” says Jackson Hill, 76. “And Mr. Duncan had a way of making you feel special. I never saw myself as a really great singer. I did sing at the choir in my church, but to have somebody say to you that, ‘You really got a good, strong voice,’ it just made you feel, 'Oh, wow, I feel special.' And he had a way of making you feel that you had a contribution to give to the team.”

For Mr. Duncan, a choir had to sound as if it were a single voice, Deborah Johnson (WPHS 1972) says: “When we sang in all these different voices, alto, soprano, tenor, bass, and it sounded like one voice, it created a very mystical atmosphere in a room, you know, people were like, just spellbound.”

“He had such an incredible musical ear, and we would rehearse, and he could pull out exactly who was singing off key," she says. “After it seemed like everybody had their part, and then, for some reason, it just wasn't perfect, and Mr. Duncan would grab the top of his head and start pulling his hair.

“We weren't afraid of Mr. Duncan, but we hated to disappoint him. And we knew when he grabbed that hair that, oh, something wasn't right, and we were gonna have to do it again and again and again and again until we got it right," says Johnson, 70.

“He was just the epitome of perfection, and he was too loving and too kind to even think about raising his voice or criticizing us. He just expected the best from us, and he was determined that he was going to get the best from us. And he did it so eloquently.”

A favorite of Mayor Daley

Mr. Duncan showed his choir off everywhere he could.

They sang at local churches. Broadcasts on WBBM-FM radio, WTTW public television. A Black History Month celebration in the suburbs.

Caroling at Lakeside Bank, at the Christmas tree lighting near Buckingham Fountain where they’d end up on the 10 o’clock news.

“Those were some of the most enjoyable moments and minutes in the choir,” says Joseph Smith (WPHS 1965), 77, who joined the choir after a Phillips teacher who doubled as his organist at Pilgrim Baptist “put a bug in Mr. Duncan's ear about my abilities.”

The singers looked the part — wearing long blue robes they shuttled to performances in coveted metal boxes meant for holding roller skates.

At the Museum of Science and Industry, they earned superior ratings, the highest in citywide choral competitions, for 16 years in a row.

Their singing caught the attention of a particular fan. None of the singers know how it started. They just remember that when Mayor Daley rang up Phillips asking for a choir, they went.

“We did different performances all throughout Chicago for Mayor Daley,” Lawson says. “Whenever he needed a choir to perform for some special event, he contacted Phillips and brought Wendell Phillips High School a capella choir on board.”

Archives of the Chicago Defender newspaper, which covered Phillips’ choir more than any other publication, place the singers at the mayor’s prayer breakfasts and, in 1969, at City Hall, where he bought some of the candy bars they were selling to raise money.

For some, a refuge

Earlene Williams (WPHS 1972) fell into Mr. Duncan’s orbit by chance after suddenly losing her mother.

The summer after eighth grade, she followed a friend to a chorus class near her apartment at 39th and Lake Park. Mr. Duncan’s teaching drew her in.

For Williams, the youngest of 12 children, the choir became a refuge from the loss that she didn’t have the words back then to describe.

While singing, “I could let go and let my mind go and, you know, have a good time with my friends,” Williams, 71, says. “It was special for me because I used it sort of like therapy, you know. I could just close my eyes, and I'd imagine my mama seeing me.”

Mr. Duncan “was like a mentor, like another father, you know, it was, it made me feel real good,” she says.

When a grand invitation landed at Phillips, Williams was one of the 22 singers he included.

The experience would open up her world at 16: “It gave me my love for travel, and I've traveled a whole bunch of places since then,” she says.

The 1970 International Youth Festival in Bayreuth, Germany, chose Phillips as its first American high school choir participants. Founded in 1950 after the Iron Curtain divided Europe, the youth fest took place each summer in the town that hosted an opera festival established by composer Richard Wagner dating to the 1870s.

Phillips’ singers would tour Germany and neighboring countries for a month the following summer but only if they could scramble together an enormous sum: $22,000 for 22 choir members, plus chaperones including the mother of Arthur Thomas (now Arthur Muhammad) — the equivalent today of about $180,000.

“Boy, did we have a schedule of places to sing, to raise money,” says Guss, 71, “and we really felt like the city was really behind us.”

Mr. Duncan hatched a plan: benefit concerts, television appearances, appeal letters his singers would write. He leaned on news columnists to take up the cause.

His kids would be the only Black choir to appear.

“How do you get to Bayreuth from 39th and Prairie?” said an ad in the Chicago Sun-Times for a radio benefit on WEFM.

Horse racing mogul Marjorie Lindheimer Everett gave $8,000, and Daley kicked in $500, according to the Chicago Defender, which reported a total of $45,000 collected, enough even to fund scholarships after the trip.

The month-long European tour was a go, most of it at the festival in Germany, with, Guss recalls, stops in Amsterdam, Paris and Basil, Switzerland.

There were countless firsts for the teenagers, Guss says, starting with the plane ride.

“We posed on the stairs” of the airplane on the tarmac, Guss says. “But we sang ‘Precious Lord,’ and our parents were in tears, you know, sending our babies off.”

Between rehearsals, Europe was full of novelties to try: outdoor cafes, local dishes, toilets that didn’t work like at home, wooden shoes. Mr. Duncan had seen to spending money for the singers, too.

In Germany, Williams says people stared at the teenagers. She doesn’t remember seeing other Black people.

But, she says, “We felt special. We did, and people treated us that way."

The concert repertoire leaned unapologetically on Black anthems and spirituals: “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” “Rockin Jerusalem.” “Mary Had A Baby.”

“We were very nerved up when it comes to performing, especially at a different place like that,” Williams says. “Nobody acted out. And we'd be really, really quiet right before he's starting. Then he blows a little pipe thing, and then we get on our pitch, and then we would sing, but we were very, very scared. But the one thing that happened, it was quiet, like through the whole performance. But when we finish, and then we hear the applause, they would just stand up, and then we have to come back out, you know, take a bow and sing another, do an encore.

“We would have to do that all the time,” she says. “When I came back from Europe, I heard rumors that my father had went around bragging to his friends about me going to Europe all that time. And that made me feel good.”

Years after the choir’s triumphant return that included a Board of Ed resolution and recordings of their festival performance on Chicago TV, Mr. Duncan had a record pressed.

One side he called “The Wendell Phillips High Choir Sings Spirituals in Europe 1970,” the other “Christmas Joy at Home 1973.” He handed copies out to his singers but apparently sold some, too.

A $2 price tag marks the cover, above a photo of the Bayreuth crew, dripping with 1970s style: Soloists Linda Clark, in glasses and an orange collar, and David Anderson, towering over the back row, since have died. Guss wears a dark jacket over a white blouse. Williams kneels in front of her, a patterned scarf tied around her hair.

‘We never stopped singing’

It was the recent discovery of that record for $1 in a Chicago thrift store that sparked the idea to look for its singers.

But when the question arose, ‘Were you on the record?’ choir alumni chortled, ‘Which one?’

There’s a 1969 album from a North Dakota music educators conference “because of Mr. Duncan's history of always winning the choir competitions in the city of Chicago,” says Regina Conway-Phillips (WPHS 1969).

And “Wendell Phillips High School A Capella Choir Brings Christmas Joy” was recorded in 1968 as a fundraiser.

Conway-Phillips, 73, sang on both and remembers recording 13 Christmas favorites at school. Printed on a simple, white, paper sleeve in red and green was its title, “Andrew Duncan, Director” and Sound-O-Rama Records, with the old 34th and Michigan address of the record label. She didn’t recall how or where the LP was sold, but photos published in the Chicago Defender show a bank president handing a check to Mr. Duncan with unspecified proceeds in December 1968.

Again, he made the money stretch. On the road, Mr. Duncan always arranged for his singers to stay with families. He’d do the same on later bus trips to sing in Iowa and to his hometown in western Pennsylvania.

“He paired us up to different people's homes, and we traveled and went there, and we sang,” Conway-Phillips says.

For some of the kids, it was their first trip outside of Illinois and included a TV appearance in Minnesota.

“It was written up in the newspaper. It was televised in the evening news,” Conway-Phillips says. “And what was most impressive was that there were some students that were ill while we were performing. A couple of them fainted while we were singing, and the people on the sides of them would quietly take them off the stands and then come back and continue to sing.

“And we never stopped singing,” she says. “We never interrupted the songs. And that was one of the things that the people who witnessed it were most impressed with, was our discipline and that we stood there and we paid attention to Mr. Duncan, and we never stopped singing.”

Here's what still stands out for Rosemarie Eggleston (WPHS 1969), who had traveled before — to Fargo as a child with her jazz musician parents:

“You got away from home, you was able to meet different people,” she says. “The food we had was good, they call it a smorgasbord. It was a different kind of atmosphere. So I was fortunate to really have been considered to have been a part of it.”

And the performance killed. Ten songs, two in foreign languages.

“I mean, they could not believe that we could sing that good. And we did,” Eggleston, 73, says. “We brought the house down. They applauded us for the longest time."

The album ends with two minutes of roaring applause.

Christmas in the summertime

Ten Christmas songs recorded in Mr. Duncan’s church would round out the B side of “Spirituals in Europe.”

Junior year had just ended for La Nitta Fletcher Johnson, yet for two weeks she rode the bus to Sixth Grace Presbyterian Church from her home in the Wentworth Gardens, 39th and Pershing, in June 1973 to rehearse and perform.

“He told us we were recording Christmas songs,” she says. “We did it over summer vacation. When it came out, he let us know. And everybody got a record.

“It was an all-day thing, like going to school. I packed a lunch,” she says. “It was tedious because they wanted to get it right, I guess. But you didn't mind. It was someplace new, and it was in the neighborhood.”

On the back cover photo, Fletcher Johnson stands in the front row, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, “with some little bangs in front.”

The granddaughter of a pastor and one of four girls, Fletcher Johnson grew up singing in his Gary, Indiana, church and at funerals with her mother, once a singer in a quartet. Fletcher Johnson joined the choir as a sophomore soprano. Her mother was very strict — except when it came to choir.

“She knew the importance of it,” Fletcher Johnson, 68, says. “She knew the importance of it, and she trusted Mr. Duncan, and she trusted her child. She knew who she raised, and she was musical herself.”

Franklin Glenn (WPHS 1973) was one of the choir’s basses.

“It was the first time ever being put to wax,” says Glenn, 69, who grew up at 38th and Ellis. “It was just as commonplace with Mr. Duncan. You never see him get excited. He had a steady pace about him.

“We could be up on the middle of the stage singing, and there was a particular something coming up in the song that he wanted us to emphasize. And just by looking at him, you can see through the intensity by the way that he would direct with his stick and with his fingers.”

As a young Miss Fletcher prepared to leave Phillips, graduating in 1974, so did Mr. Duncan. He resigned to become the district superintendent of music in Racine, Wisconsin.

“It hurt a lot of people,” Glenn says. “A lot of us begged and tried to get him to stay.”

Fletcher Johnson didn’t realize Mr. Duncan was leaving until she was gone.

“If I had known he was going to retire that year,” she says, “I would have asked him, 'Can I have one of those skate boxes?' Ever seen a skate box? It had ‘Wendell Phillips High School’ on it. It had the logo on there and blue and white, and it was metal, and it had the little flip latch. But it was just so cool. You carried that skate box, and you went to sing somewhere.

“All of us together with the skate box, we just thought we were, like, the thing.”

A reunion tradition begins and grows

Sharon Lawson doesn’t know how the rumor started in 1992 that Mr. Duncan got sick.

“It was a small group of us that decided to go and visit him. I wrote him a letter and got permission to come and visit. We just all drove up and spent the day with him, and he wanted more. So he said, ‘Well, see who else you can get to come.’ And that's how it grew.”

Michael Hill (WPHS 1972) then hosted the gathering for a decade at his home.

“You can't really describe the impact, actually, that the choir has had, not just then but all over the years,” says Hill, 70, who years ago was drawn to the sounds of “angels singing” from the choir room on Phillips’ third floor.

Then, Debra Fountain-Ellis (WPHS 1972), 70, pulled them together. “We've met in churches. We've gone to Racine on several occasions to meet in the Duncans’ home, just any place that we can go and be able to come together.”

Stephanie Whitmore, 70, caught up on Facebook with classmate Fountain-Ellis “some years back to find out that the choir was having reunions, and I've been joining ever since.”

“It's unbelievable, but that's how much they loved him,” says Carol Duncan, Andrew Duncan’s wife. A second marriage for both, each the parent of three, they met in the 1970s, when she booked his choir for her church. “He didn’t just teach music. He taught life.”

She accompanied him to the gatherings, taking hundreds of photos of the singers who’d since earned college degrees and law degrees and doctorates, taught, headed libraries — a few married fellow Phillips students. Some left Illinois for warmer climes. Most still sang in church.

“They've gone on to have beautiful lives,” Mrs. Duncan, 85, says. “And, oh, it just pleased him to no end to be in their homes and see how they were living.”

He cherished having them together to sing, be it at his 75th birthday party or at his funeral in May 2023.

“Mr. Duncan always said, ‘Please continue this. This is a valuable time for us all. Please do not end the reunions once I pass away,’” says Joyce Atkins Darling (WPHS 1972), the latest of the alumni to pull reunions together. “Who knows how long we'll be able to continue to do it, but I think that we all feel an obligation to make sure that we follow what Mr. Duncan had requested of us.

“How many schools and how many alumni from schools still continue every year, multiple years consecutively to be able to make a special effort to come together and share in the magic of song, to share in the magic of harmony, of us being able to share our time together?" Atkins Darling, 69, says.

Mr. Duncan conducted his a capella singers for the last time in 2022. Before he rooted in a shirt pocket for his pitch pipe, before the harmonies would lure neighbors to his backyard fence, the choir director took a moment to marvel at the decades they had spent together.

“To do this as long as we have,” he said. “I wish we could get everybody. Let me tell you how much I appreciate you coming. I guess I thought about this because of my age. I wanted to have it, and I’m so glad you all came. It’s just been wonderful.

“I hope all of you have a wonderful rest of your lives.”

Contributing: Araceli Gómez-Aldana, Pat Nabong