Tapping Music’s Power to Heal
Who can say for sure why some memories stay put and others fly away? I’m only qualified to note that while Tom Tipton sang to a group of elderly people Monday afternoon in Stanton, he helped some return to long-ago places.
Mellie Moreland is from Pennsylvania and remembers singing Christmas carols in the snow in the year or so after World War II. It was not long after she married. She’s 83.
Marjorie Harris has been listening to and singing Christmas songs and gospel hymns since she was a girl in Rhode Island. She’s 78. She believes that at the times she’s needed to go to a hospital, God has given her a Bible verse or a song to cling to.
That’s the power Tipton wants to tap. He has seen it before -- this power of the old gospel hymns to inspire and comfort. At 72 and with a voice that has lost little of its strength, he says he’ll spend the rest of his singing life doing just that.
It is what brought him to Quaker Gardens on Monday afternoon, singing a half-dozen standards to a group of 60 to 70 residents, including a few from an Alzheimer’s unit.
Tipton made his reputation singing nearly 100 times over the years on Robert Schuller’s “Hour of Power” television ministry. I first wrote about Tipton in 1995 and described his life’s arc from shining shoes in Washington D.C. to guest performer in the Clinton White House. He met the Schullers at Hubert Humphrey’s funeral in 1978, at which Tipton sang and Schuller spoke.
Nowadays, Tipton says, he wants to do what he says no one else is doing -- singing gospel hymns at nursing homes and other senior centers. Sponsored by a Minnesota church, he hopes to sing at 40 sites in 2006.
“I let God use me to bring the hymns alive,” Tipton says after his 30-minute performance Monday. “I was raised on these hymns and have been going to church since I was 5. They take us back to a place.”
With Christmas just days away, I ask Mellie Moreland if she’s got the spirit. “I think I have the spirit,” she says, smiling. “My husband died a year ago, on the 20th, so I was very apprehensive about this Christmas, but I still love the music.”
It isn’t wishful thinking to say that the songs can heal. Lee Ann Shelton, the center’s activities director, says “reminiscence therapy” is part of the treatment program for residents. “It entails going back in their younger lives and sharing their memories,” she says. Shelton notices a difference with some residents as they listen to Tipton. “They’re usually not that responsive,” she says afterward.
Like a seasoned nightclub performer, Tipton works the crowd, going down the rows and shaking people’s hands. “That’s a pretty hat you’ve got on,” he tells one woman.
He pays particular attention to a 79-year-old man in the front row. “You were such an inspiration to me 25 years ago,” Tipton says, talking to the man on bended knee.
The man is Ken Leestma,a former pastor at Crystal Cathedral and longtime Tipton friend. He has Alzheimer’s, Shelton says, and as recently as last week sat motionless during a meeting, not even raising his head. But as Tipton invoked his name and sang songs that he knew Leestma knew, Shelton was amazed.
“He even sang ‘Silent Night.’ I couldn’t believe the change. To see the effect it had on him, that was very exciting. It was probably the combination of the music and connecting with Tom in the past. People with Alzheimer’s have windows; there are times when something triggers a memory, something triggered from the past.”
Tipton jokes that his voice should have long departed. It has not. It is alive and well.
He closes with “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” and asks the audience members to close their eyes and remember their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and then sings:
“Great is thy faithfulness, great is thy faithfulness/
Morning by morning, new mercies I see .... “
Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.