Phil Perrin, 1940-2025

[Will Partain]

Folks, Phil Perrin died Wednesday, apparently of a heart attack. He led twice at Oolenoy [1] on Saturday and, as far as I know, conducted the choir at Cliffside Baptist Church on Sunday.

Phil worked entirely and prolifically in the world of Southern Baptist music. This Gardner-Webb profile covers most of it: https://gardner-webb.edu/phil-perrin/

(Note that he was also hiking/climbing/travelling-mad.)

Phil's connection to shapenote singing went deeper than you might expect: his dissertation (at SWBTS [2]) was on the rudiments: "Theoretical Introductions in American Tunebooks from 1801-1860". He did a significant spell in the Library of Congress working on it.

Phil first appears in the Christian Harmony minutes at the William Walker Memorial singing (Spartanburg) in 1995 [3] and 1996. Then there's a gap, and he resurfaced in the 201x's. June Hobbs, known to some of you, says "I'll never forget ... how happy he looked when he sang!"

Phil was a lovely man, and I can personally vouch for the fact he would eat anything you put on his plate [4].

Will

[1] https://www.christianharmony.org/minutes/2025minutes/furman-2025.html

[2] Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, TX

[3] https://www.christianharmony.org/minutes/1995minutes/wm-walker-mem-1995.html

[4] When he would travel, he was notoriously indifferent to the food. He'd go to France and eat cheese-and-crackers he'd brought with him.

[Erin Fulton]

I read Dr. Perrin's dissertation when I was working on my first "real" musicology paper during my second semester at Fort Hays State University. He had cited a paper given at a regional conference of the American Musicological Society that dealt with the same topic (the relationship between the moods of time and tempo), with a page number, suggesting that it had at one point existed in a fixed form and not just as lecture notes. Reaching out to the AMS chapter in question produced no leads, so, in a fit of despair, I sat on the floor of a practice room and dialed the Boiling Springs public library, crossing my fingers that Dr. Perrin might have retired near Gardner-Webb and that they could dig up his phone number. The librarians came through. Wilda picked up the house phone--my first, utterly baffling encounter with a Tidewater accent--and I asked if she could hand me to Dr. Perrin. I explained what I was working on and asked whether he might have a copy of that AMS paper or a record of where he had read it. He was cheerfully amused that somebody was referring to his dissertation that long after the fact, but promised to look through his notes and see what could be found. About a week later, I received a cramped but very sweet postcard from him that managed to include all the information he could dig up on that conference paper as well as requesting a copy of my own term paper once it was finished.

Years afterward, I was at the 2020 iteration of the Walker memorial--a miniscule singing, the last one to be held in NC prior to months of Covid disruption. Over the course of the morning, I at first thought I had caught the name of a trim older gentleman who led several songs as "Phil," and then as "Dr. Perrin." I put the geography and chronology together, and a part of the group we walked towards a restaurant for lunch asked him if he remembered getting a very strange unprompted phone call from a Kansas undergraduate on a Sunday afternoon about a decade before, quizzing him about a single footnote in a 1968 dissertation! Indeed he did, and remained as warm and generous to this very junior scholar as he had been on the first phone call. I will dearly treasure the Hartford Publishing Company annuals that he salvaged to give to me.

E. Fulton.

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