Pianist made start in ‘old-timey’ church

ALFORD (FBW)—A young woman in a white country church played hymns as the tiny congregation sang, never once thinking that because of her hands the music vibrating through the one-room building would still echo 59 years later.

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It was 1946 when Lucile Davis came to First Baptist Church in Alford. She and her husband Joe, a deacon at FBC from the time they became members until his death in 2004 at the age of 90, had bought land just two miles from the church.

“Oh my, when we first started going to Alford church it was just an old timey—old timey frame building,” Davis said. “It was painted white and it didn’t—I don’t think it had even any Sunday School rooms.”

The church was like dozens of others that dotted the peaceful countryside, Davis recalled. Often the congregation consisted primarily of her husband and seven children, but even then Davis played the piano.

Davis, 86, said she and her husband took their responsibilities as Christian parents seriously, making sure their children were present and accounted for at each Sunday School lesson.

“They didn’t have any choice,” Davis recalled. “We never did ask our children if they wanted to go, they just took it for granted they were going.”

Since they were there every Sunday, the church began to depend on her, Davis said. Gradually she became an institution, playing the piano during Sunday services for 59 years.

“I feel like I’m needed,” Davis said. “… As long as I feel like I’m needed and as long as the Lord wants me to continue playing, I’ll continue as long as my health holds up.”

The piano is a long-time love of Davis’ – who began to play at 13.

“My mother could play the piano … but somehow or other she just didn’t have the patience to teach me music,” Davis said. “I would hear her play and I just knew in my heart that I had to play the piano.”

According to Davis, her formal musical education was limited, but she did her best to improve herself. Without a piano of her own it was difficult.

“We were pretty poor in those days, I assure you,” Davis said, laughing.

Davis and her husband moved near Alford to farm their own land. The couple cleared the land and from the timber built a small “ordinary frame house,” Davis said.

The boys shared one room, with bunk beds “so we could stack them,” Davis explained, while the girls shared another.

“We were really struggling to make a living and my mother—who could play the piano—she sent me her piano,” Davis said. “She bought herself another piano and the man that sold her the piano brought her old piano over to me because my mother knew that I needed a piano to practice on.”

On that old, black upright, she improved her musical education in earnest and even taught lessons, Davis said. Several of her pupils played in their own churches.

“Several of my pupils that I did teach music to made some good advances and I think they did real well,” Davis said.

Hymns are kinder to fingers which are “a little stiff,” the church is now brick, and the congregation has grown over the years, more than she ever dreamed Davis said, but still she sits at the front, her fingers flashing as she plays.

To Davis’ pastor, Tommy Seedorf, however, she is more than just a set of flashy fingers. According to Seedorf, who prefers to call Davis “Frisky” she still “plays as good as anybody.”

Not only an excellent pianist, Seedorf said Davis was also a biblical scholar, a woman who “keeps a preacher on his toes.”

“She is what a Christian woman, a virtuous woman is all about,” Seedorf said. “She is the epitome of Proverbs 31 and there just isn’t enough good I can say about her.”

Another pastor, David Rice from Ancient City Baptist Church in St. Augustine, can’t say enough good about his church’s organist, 69-year-old Annelle West who began playing for the church at the age of 19.

“She’s just a tremendous encouragement to us all and her music is a great blessing,” Rice said. “…The joy of the Lord is really a strength of hers.”

The church plans to honor West at a reception on May 15.

“For 50 years, week in and week out, she’s just been unbelievably faithful to the Lord and to His church,” Rice said.