Phil Perrin Obituary and Funeral Details

[Fulton, Erin]

Phil Perrin, known to musicologists for his research on nineteenth-century tunebook rudiments and more intimately to singers (from various traditions) in the Blue Ridge, has died. Visitation will be at Cliffside Baptist Church, 220 Old Main Street, Cliffside, NC on Tuesday the 20th at 1:00 with funeral service at 2:00. See a brief obituary from the Shelby Star here. I'll copy over what I wrote for the Christian Harmony list when I first got the news below:

"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.