Utahn's noted for great notes

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Feb 22, 2005 | by Doug Robinson Deseret Morning News

When approached for a feature story interview, Janice Kapp Perry was a little puzzled by the attention, just as friends had predicted. The best thing about Janice Perry, they had said, is that she doesn't know she's Janice Perry. Which is why Perry wonders why anyone would want to do a story about her.

"I might be the most ordinary person you have ever met," she warns the reporter. "I hope there is a story in there somewhere."

She's the most ordinary person you ever met if ordinary is someone who has written and recorded close to 900 songs and 60 albums, as well two musicals and nine cantatas -- and she didn't start writing until she was 38.

This quiet, mild 66-year-old woman is a songwriting machine who turned a hobby into a family business.

And yet she has hardly touched the piano in the past two decades except to find the notes for her compositions because of the onset of a painful, mysterious paralysis in her left hand.

Janice Perry is so ordinary that she's a household name to 12 million members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her husband/manager Doug doesn't exaggerate when he says, "You can go to any Primary or Young Women's (church) meeting anywhere in the world on any Sunday and hear her music."

The LDS Church has published 10 of her songs in its children's Primary songbook, as well as one in the church's hymn book. The church once conducted an informal survey, asking people to name their favorite children's songs. Four of the top seven were Perry's, and two more made the top 20.

"She is part of the culture," says Craig Jessop, director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, whose ranks once included Perry. "She has touched more lives of the LDS Church than any living LDS composer."

Her songs have been sung and recorded by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and performed by the Mormon Youth Symphony and Choir on Temple Square. One of her songs, "Everyday Heroes," which she co-wrote with Sen. Orrin Hatch, was recorded by Brooks & Dunn on the 2002 Winter Games Olympic CD, and 8,000 high school students sang the song at the Washington Monument last year.

"Heal Our Land," another Hatch-Perry song, was sung by gospel singer Wintley Phipps at the National Prayer Breakfast and at a concert in Washington in advance of President Bush's inauguration. "Jesus' Love Is Like a River" was sung by Gladys Knight and has been performed widely outside the LDS Church.

"She's filled the world with her music," says Michael Moody, the LDS Church music chairman.

Before the music came along, there was an athletic career that lasted well into middle age, and there were children. Lots of them. She's got more kids calling her Mom than Carol Brady, with four of her own and 11 foster children.

The melodies and words have sprung from her brain as if from a bottomless well. Think of it: 900 songs in 28 years. Her songs are so singable and so immediately embraced that they were included in church songbooks alongside decades-old songs that had had to pass the test of time.

"Her songs are as beloved as much by adults as children," says Jessop.

To Mormons, her songs are as much a part of Sunday as a quadruple combination. Everyone in the church knows these songs: "As Sisters in Zion," "I Love to See the Temple," "We'll Bring the World His Truth (Army of Helaman)," "(I Belong to) The Church of Jesus Christ," "I'm Trying to Be Like Jesus," "Love Is Spoken Here," and "A Child's Prayer."

"They are classics in the church," says Joy Lundberg, Perry's friend, cousin and sometime collaborator.

Perry finds inspiration everywhere. She wrote "Where Is Heaven?" while pondering the whereabouts and doings of her infant son Richard, who had passed away a few hours after birth.

She wrote "Love Is Spoken Here" under duress. She planned to enter an annual church songwriting contest, but two days before the entry deadline she still had nothing. While attending a church social, she asked Doug to help her think of an idea. Doug pointed to a cross-stitched sampler on the wall: "Love Is Spoken Here."

"There's your title," he said.

The song took first place and became an LDS favorite.

She wrote the musical arrangement for "As Sisters in Zion" on a battery-powered keyboard while leaning against a fire hydrant in a weedy vacant lot in Philadelphia, waiting for her bus to be repaired.

Perry seems to be able to compose new songs on demand. Many of them began as requests from local and general church leadership. The LDS Church asked her to write music for a poem written by a pioneer 150 years earlier, which became "As Sisters in Zion." A local leader asked her to write a missionary song, which resulted in "Army of Helaman." A stake leader asked her to write a song about the temple, so she wrote "I Love to See the Temple."

Her trademark: simple, singable, melodic songs.

"Janice has one of the most remarkable gifts of melody I've ever seen," says Jessop.

Moody says much the same thing: "She has a gift for melody. And she has the ability to write in a way that resonates with people."