Lucile Turner's Blues

One of the finest composers and singers of Negro music in the U.S. is the wife of a Lynchburg, Va. overall manufacturer. Smoky-eyed Lucile Barrow Turner is the poised, ingratiating, slightly helpless-seeming epitome of Southern ladyhood. But when she cuts loose on a blues or a "shoutin' " spiritual, she gives the effect of a New Orleans barrelhouse contralto.

Lucile Turner calls her type of singing "makin' glory." Thumping out her own accompaniments at the piano, she sings about love, Jesus, "pleasurin' my man," cotton fields, the thousand and one details and incidents of the Southern Negro's life. Sometimes she intones a prayer or a sermon in graphic Negro imagery.

Nearly all of her songs are her own original compositions. But every one has the authentic ring of the Negro's own pulsing musical dialect. When the late James Weldon Johnson heard her sing several years ago, he was astounded. "I never believed," he remarked while tears ran down his cheeks, "that a white woman could tell it like that."

Lucile Turner was last week on tour in Washington, D.C., "makin' glory" for Lord Halifax at the British Embassy, giving his son, legless Lieut. Richard Wood, the best time he had had since an unexploded Nazi bomb smashed him in Libya. Recent concert dates had taken her to many U.S. Army camps, to Manhattan's Rainbow Room, Brooklyn's Academy of Music, Manhattan's Town Hall.

"Uncle Robert." Raised on a plantation in Virginia's south-side Brunswick County, Lucile Turner first learned about Negro music from "Uncle Robert," a colored houseman who took her as a child to Negro prayer meetings. Later, after a fashionable private-school education, she studied music at Boston's New England Conservatory. For years she so thoroughly steeped herself in Negro music that she could create it as naturally as the Negroes themselves.

When she is not on tour, Lucile Turner lives with her husband on a 600-acre farm at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains just outside Lynchburg. There her hus band has some 150 head of pedigreed cattle. The Turners have three children --an Army captain, a boy about to join the Marines, a daughter just graduated from Stephens College, Columbia, Mo. As a war mother, Lucile Turner has recently written several war songs ( We Are Ready, When I Heard the News).

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