Prairie View pianist got his start in a small Texas town

PRAIRIE VIEW – Driving to Cameron a couple of weeks ago, the little town southeast of Waco that had the audacity - with native-son Drayton McLane's encouragement - to make a bid for Amazon's second headquarters, I was mulling over my decades-old Cameron memories. As I've mentioned before in this space, Cameron was one of the little Central Texas towns I got to know long ago as my dad's summer helper on his potato-chip route.

The Milam County seat was the largest of the little towns on our Tuesday run. We called on Matula's Grocery downtown, a couple of cafes, several beer joints, neighborhood grocery stores and Tex Miller's, the best hamburger stand in all of Central Texas. (Only Bob's Big Boy Burger in Killeen came close.)

Amazingly, the hole-in-the-wall hamburger mecca is still in business. George "Tex" Miller has been gone for many years and the nondescript, old building (with no sign) is a bit dingier, but the burgers are as good as ever. In business 80 years, current owner Sandy Terry told me. The secret, she says, is the new grill - installed in 1956.

Before heading over to Rosebud after lunch to peddle our Creamer's Clover-Fresh Potato Chips, we had several other stops to make, including a small grocery store in Cameron's African-American neighborhood. The husband-and-wife owners lived in a house beside the store and had several children, including a little boy about my age who was a piano prodigy. More than once, his proud mother invited us into the house to listen to him play.

His name eventually faded away, but I occasionally wondered whether he had become a Fats Domino, a Duke Ellington, maybe a concert pianist touring the world.

"That's Danny Kelley," Milam County Judge Dave Barkemeyer told me. "He comes back home every now and then to play for special occasions."

I met Danny R. Kelley a few days ago - or re-met him, I should say - in his office at Prairie View A&M University, where for the past 13 years he's been dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. We laughed when we shook hands outside his office. Decades had passed - lives had been lived - but we shared a strange feeling we always had known each other.

At one end of his office I noticed a large desk groaning with papers and notes and manila folders, the arcana of a university administrator's life. Against the opposite wall was a Steinway upright, the piano he now plays after Hurricane Harvey destroyed the venerable instrument he's played for years at home in Spring.

Perfect pitch

His piano passion revealed itself when he was about two, he told me. Weekdays at noon his mother would switch on the radio in the store to listen to the Stamps Quartet, a Dallas-based gospel group whose peppy theme song on KRLD set little Danny in motion. He'd toddle over to a shelf, shove aside the canned goods and pretend to play along.

He had perfect pitch, he said, and from the beginning could tease out on a piano any tune he happened to hear. "It's still hard for me to fathom," he said. "I guess God put me here to be a musician."

A traveling piano salesman heard about the gifted youngster and stopped by the Kelley house with a piano on his truck. Kelley's father bought it for $125.

"My parents knew nothing about pianos," Kelley said. "They didn't realize this one had a short keyboard, 66 keys. I wish they had kept that piano. It would be a collector's item."

Hazel Cox, the wife of the band director at Cameron's C.H. Yoe High School - the white school in those days - arranged with the youngster's parents to give him free lessons. He studied with Cox from age five until he was in high school.

'Giving him a future'

He played the organ at Cameron's Bethel AME Church every Sunday and recalls a church meeting when members had to decide whether they could afford the new instrument a Dallas company had installed on a trial basis.

Sure, it would be nice to have the organ, a practical-thinking woman pointed out, "but once Danny graduates from high school, we don't have anyone who can play it, and we'll still be paying for it.'"

"And I never will forget," Kelley said, "one of the ladies there who was a leader of the church, said, 'We shouldn't worry about that; we're giving him a future.' I hardly ever play an organ that I do not think about that statement." (These days he's the organist at St. Frances Episcopal Church in Piney Point Village.)

Kelley, who gave annual recitals to help the church pay off the organ, went on to Prairie View, as did his four siblings. To nurture the gifted artist in their midst, the university offered to pay tuition, room and board at any school in the country where he could study with the teacher of his choice. He studied privately with Albert Hirsh, artist-in-residence at the University of Houston, and then was accepted at the Peabody Conservatory of Music of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. His tutor was the piano virtuoso Leon Fleisher, whose musical lineage stretches back to Beethoven.

"He took very, very few students," Kelley said, "but he was everything you can imagine as a teacher. He's now 89, and whenever he comes to Texas I make sure I go see him."

'Best days of my life'

Kelley got his master's degree and doctorate from Johns Hopkins and has performed in Europe, at Carnegie Hall, at the Kennedy Center and with the Houston Symphony. He came back to Prairie View as an associate professor in 1978. These days he's preparing for an April recital at Steinway Hall in New York City.

We talked about Creamer's Potato Chips - "the best," he recalled (and I agree). We talked about his hometown, where he gave his first recital at age six, before a mixed audience; where, thanks to his paper route, he knew everybody in town, white and black; where his mother was the first African-American city councilmember.

"I have vivid, almost photographic memories of growing up in Cameron," he said. "Those were some of the best days of my life. I had a great childhood, a great mom and dad."

Impromptu audiences

My dad and I weren't the only impromptu audience. "My mom was always trying to put me on stage," Kelley said.

His wife Janice, a physician, does the same thing, he said, laughing. "I ask her sometimes, 'How would you feel if every time we had company I had you take their blood pressure?'"

We both laughed. It was obvious Kelley wasn't all that perturbed.

It was a good afternoon, good to discover that two of Cameron's very best, Danny Kelley and Tex Miller's, are still going strong. I'm very happy to make their re-acquaintance.