Habitual Composer

As a very young man, demobilized after World War I (he faked a birth certificate to join up at 15), Francis Marion Grandstaff could not decide whether to follow his father's profession of medicine or his childhood inclination to music. He solved his dilemma by taking up crime.

Indiana-born, sturdily built Grandstaff boxed a little, tried selling pianos. But he found pilfering the easiest way. The only trouble was that he almost always got caught. Finally, in 1940, he was picked up in Memphis for breaking into a store, stealing a $25 radio. It was his 20th conviction and his fourth in Tennessee, and in Tennessee four strikes are out. As a "habitual criminal," Frank Grandstaff was sent to the state penitentiary at Nashville for life.

Cowboys & Indians. But Grandstaff was also a habitual musician. In the penitentiary library, he came across a book called Big Spring: the Casual Biography of a Prairie Town--a folksy history by Big Spring (Texas) Druggist Shine Philips. From his piano-selling days, Grandstaff remembered Big Spring: a prairie town of 20,000 which had sprung up around a spring where buffaloes, Indians, cowboys and finally the Texas and Pacific R.R. had come for water. He decided to write some music about Big Spring.

Clapped into solitary for stealing luminal from the prison dispensary, Grandstaff could compose without disturbance. He wrote on the walls, worked out rhythmic passages by pounding his commode and the frame of his cot. When he was released from solitary, he put words & music on paper.

One Sunday he got a chance to show his cantata, Big Spring, to a visiting musician who was conducting a choral program for the prisoners. The visitor thought it was good, took it to a Nashville radio musician who declared it "definitely better than good." Grandstaff mailed off a copy to Big Spring Druggist-Historian Shine Philips.

That was two years ago. The Texas and Pacific's 34-voice chorus sang it, but Tennessee authorities refused to spring Composer Grandstaff long enough to come and hear it. Last week, with a head of pressure built up for a centennial celebration, Big Spring was doing better by its favorite composer.

Chromatics & Hash. The cantata itself had been whooped up, among others, by Composer Roy Harris ("a sense of strength ... I wonder where Grandstaff heard choral singing so brilliant"), and Big Spring bigwigs had watered down the Tennessee authorities. Last week, accompanied by a grim, 200-lb., two-gunned Big Spring sheriff, R. E. Wolf, and a smiling Shine Philips, Composer Grandstaff was flown to Texas by private plane to hear his cantata sung.

What Honored Guest Grandstaff and a packed audience in Big Spring Municipal Auditorium heard was a half hour of music which made up in lyrical lustiness what it lacked in originality: a kind of chuckwagon hash--sometimes tasty--made like every cowboy-and-plains song ever written. Composer Grandstaff himself admitted, "It's chaotic in places. There are times when I get lost . . . and I use chromatics ... to get back on the track."

This week, as Grandstaff headed back for Tennessee and the penitentiary, he had the cheers of Big Springers in his ears. Mayor G. W. Dabney summed it up: "Our biggest boost since we struck oil."

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