Honeysucker

By: Paul Joseph Walkowski
OperaOnline.us

Laid back, steady, accomplished, taking life as it comes, that’s the impression one gets of Robert Honeysucker, 62, as he recounts the humble journey from his home in Tennessee on January 13, 1943, to accomplished opera bass-baritone, private instructor and conservatory teacher, 2005.
The son of a Methodist minister dad, Honeysucker says of his early childhood years that he lived a nomadic lifestyle, never really calling much of any one place home, or giving a lot of thought to something as distant as tomorrow, especially when the day provided enough of its own challenges.
“Hope” for a young boy growing up Black in the segregationist era, he will tell you, was a luxury you didn’t factor into your thinking – and so to break the monotony he, along with others in the same predicament, sang.
“Growing up in a Southern environment,” he recalls matter-of-factly in a voice barely above a whisper, “singing was sort of a natural thing.” He pauses, shrugs his shoulders and says casually: “We just sang.” By the time he was six years old, his father recommended that he sing a solo in “one of the African-American branches of the Methodist Church, the C.M.E.” He explains C.M.E means Colored Methodist Episcopal.
That early direction, he says, carried over to school as well. “If there was a chorus or singing organization in town or school or in church, I was involved in it. I sang because I could.”
A child prodigy, he wasn’t. When he says “we just sang” he hints at no agenda behind the comment. Indeed, as one looks back at Robert Honeysucker’s life, the thought of singing as an avocation, or as a career, came very late – even though it was an integral part of his life from very early on.
As a young boy and early teen it was his singing in a choir that provided escape and something to do. And what the choir sang was what he got to know – and it wasn’t Motown or rock-and-roll, the rage of young people growing up in that era. It was either gospel or hymnal. As for classical music or opera, Honeysucker says he didn’t even know what these music forms were.
“There was no classical role model for any of us who aspired, and living in these small towns, and living as we did in this period of apartheid in the south, I think the issue was more trying to survive and get through the day and get through your life.” He says the idea “of aspiring to something as lofty as opera” was beyond his imagination.
But there was television, and whether he knew it or not, there was something on television that would speak to him in a way nothing else did. He used to watch the Firestone Hour, “and not really understand what it was all about, but I listened,” he says. “I couldn’t turn it off. I didn’t know what they were singing. It sounded funny, certainly not like anything I ever heard before, and it certainly didn’t sound like anything like I ever did.” But at 10 or 12-years old, he says, “it was something that I listened to. And every week it would come on and I guess no one else wanted to watch anything else, so that’s what I watched.”
He pauses for a moment and breaks into a theme song. “If I could tell you about my devotion. . .” and then stops and smiles, self-consciously. “I can still remember the theme song,” he says with a chuckle, “I don’t remember who sang it.” Come to think of it, he says, he doesn’t remember much of any of the singers he saw on the early Firestone Hour shows. “I’m sure I saw some of the greatest names in opera for that period. Who they were, I couldn’t tell you. What they sang, I couldn’t tell you. But the idea that they were singing this stuff that I couldn’t turn off. . . I couldn’t switch the channel.” The year was 1957.
By the time he entered high school his interest in singing hadn’t changed much from his earlier years. It was just something to do, made a little more interesting by a high school teacher, Lucile Woods, whom he recalls always threatened to quit teaching and retire to her front porch to drink “belly-washers” whenever the class got too rowdy.

In 1958 the New York Philharmonic had made a decision to appoint Leonard Bernstein its music director. Bernstein, in turn, made a commitment from the start to make the Young People’s Concerts -- a staple of CBS -- a centerpiece of his artistic outreach work to introduce young people to classical music. One of those young people who tuned in to the program every Saturday morning to listen and watch was Robert Honeysucker. A member of “The Teen Towners”, a local choral group that sang on radio out of Memphis, Honeysucker says the Towners “would take do-wop and Motown [music] and rearrange them for chorals.” After he sang in the morning, he would rush home and listen to Bernstein’s concerts. “I would watch and was fascinated by the guy jumping around on stage, and again, not really knowing what they were doing, but I was interested in the music. I guess it spoke to me in some way. So, that was what I grew up with.”
With high school completed, Honeysucker says he felt a little isolated. “I guess I explored my options. What were the options” he asks. “for a black kid in Memphis Tennessee in 1960? The options I looked at weren’t necessarily attractive. I was recruited by the military. I was offered airborne. I could do that – or I could go to school.” He chose school, describing it as “the least onerous of the options that faced me.”
It was an unsatisfying decision, however, all around. He says he feels he disappointed his father who would have preferred he enter the ministry, and it was a lackluster choice as far as he was concerned, since he acknowledges that he wasn’t anywhere near emotionally ready for college either. None of the options “struck a chord” he says.
And that was the way his life went. He entered college on a choral scholarship – Tougaloo College in Jackson Mississippi. The year was 1960. “It was a very interesting time,” he explains, for a number of reasons, but for purposes of this chronology, it marked a time in his life when he realized he actually enjoyed listening to classical music. “All the other previous influences and impressions,” he recalls, reflecting on his early singing experience, “that had been made on me which were disparate and had no cohesion – at least they didn’t register with me – sank in in college.”

But not even this realization about what he liked to listen to, or the fact that he always came back to singing, hinted at where he should direct his energies. As a matter of fact when asked to select a major, he chose history, not music. “That lasted about one semester,” he recalls, noting that his teacher, a Mrs. Jackson, called him aside one day and said, ‘I don’t think you and history are made for each other. So, I have taken the liberty of making an appointment for you with the chair of the Music Department.” Honeysucker remembers answering, “Oh? When”. And she said, “About right now.”
That’s the kind of school it was, he says, nurturing. “What she did was not unusual for the school.”
It was a chance meeting with classmates in the school library one day that turned his preference in music into something a little deeper. He explains: “My classmates we’re doing a listening assignment and I asked them what they were listening to, and they said ‘we’re listening to this piece for class – a piece by Brahams.’ And they said, ‘Do you want to listen?’ and I said, sure. So I put the headpiece on and I was blown away – blown away. It was the first thirty bars of a violin concerto of Brahams. It was as if everything that I had listened to all coalesced and came together in that one moment and that’s what turned me on to classical music. And I knew that that was my future.”

There is a difference between being a voice major and studying music and knowing that music is your future, and deciding to make a career as a singer. At this point in his life, Honeysucker knew only that he enjoyed music. His plans for the future were still vague, however. In a meeting with the head of the Music Department, Ariel Lovelace -- “Pops” to the students -- Pops tried to convince him that music could provide a career, and that he should pursue it, but Honeysucker was skeptical. “He [Pops] said, ‘Picture yourself ten years from now and what you’d like to be doing’. And, of course, I couldn’t see beyond the next day. I couldn’t allow myself to visualize ten years down the road. But it was a challenge, and it was something I was asked to do and I tried it.”
“I was a voice major,” he says, “so I began to explore many avenues. But I really only explored choral music. I didn’t really attach any real significance to it. I learned a repertoire and I learned to sing.”
During his college years he attended a number of operas and, along with fellow students, performed some operatic scenes and concert opera. “I saw the best and worst of opera,” he recounts, of the performances he attended, “and I enjoyed it. But it really didn’t register.” As a matter of fact, he thought theater, not singing, might be his calling. “My theater director in college encouraged me to go to New York and try my hand in acting.”