Patrick Littlejohn
Photo: Urban News

Patrick Littlejohn –

Patrick Littlejohn is a world-class pianist, with fans across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.

This month he plans to release a CD of his new classical compositions (as well as jazz and a spiritual or two). He performed in two concerts in 2017 at the Masterworks Theater in Hendersonville, and next he will join Eric Scheider’s string quartet for a performance at the Hendersonville Unitarian-Universalist Church.

He is also studying—with a full scholarship—with a graduate of the Berkeley School of Music in Boston. As a youth he had dreamed of attending Berkeley, but his family couldn’t afford it; now Phil Ditullio is training him in the Schillinger System of Orchestration, the style used by Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and other great orchestra conductors.

But Littlejohn’s life has not been a smooth road to success.

Born to a Catholic family in Spartanburg, SC, Patrick, his two brothers and a sister heard Handel, Bach, and other European composers rather than the gospel music of the Baptist church. His father bought him a piano when he was ten years old. Yet by the late 1950s his world was in turmoil.

“School integration, Jim Crow, racism … on TV you saw this violence, so my father sent me to a town called Northeast, in Pennsylvania, near Lake Erie. I had dreamed of being a monk, so I lived and studied at the seminary. I played piano, but of course we couldn’t play any rock and roll or jazz. Only classical.”

Within a year he grew homesick and returned to Spartanburg, enrolling in 10th grade at Carver High School. He wanted to be in the marching band, so his father bought him a trombone. “I played in the All State Band—the musicians were the best in the state.”

After graduating, Littlejohn began at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, and his life took strange turns. He married and had a child, and had to work to support his family, but the diesel fumes at his job near a loading dock brought on a severe illness: pulmonary sarcoidosis. He went to a hospital and then a sanitarium in Columbia—where doctors told his mother he would not survive. But the Medical University of Charleston was researching his illness, so he went there.

“I did not take the word of the doctors. I believe in God. So I visualized myself being healthy … playing football, running track. And it worked. After about three weeks in Charleston I got out.”

Back home he studied jazz and music-writing through a correspondence course from the University of Miami. Then he started playing at a Greenville jazz club, the Art Ark, which hosted jazz musicians, artists, and poets.

Finally, in 1977, Littlejohn earned his degree in Music Education—a dozen years after first enrolling at Johnson C. Smith. He had orchestrated Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for the school’s marching band, and laughs at the memory. “When they played it, the football players were in a huddle, they’d get back and they’d be dancing in a line.”

For many years he continued performing as a sideman and soloist. In the early 2000s Littlejohn got very sick again. Medicines had unexpected side effects; under the last drug the doctors tried, he had seizures.

“I broke my leg, my ankles, my back, shattered a vertebra. I felt like I was a failure: insecurity, paranoia. And then in a dream, angels came and told me how to save my life—through music.”

In the nursing home, he composed a piece about Dr. King, using the out-of-tune piano in the therapy room.

“Everybody thought I was a joke, this man in the hospital who wrote a piece for a classical orchestra. But my physical therapist bought me books online; books on orchestration, counterpoint, theory.”

One day the activities director came in and said “Patrick, honey, go to your room.” I thought, ‘Why does she want me to go to my room?’ He discovered that the activity department had bought him a Casio (electronic) piano, on which he finished his composition.

By chance, the nursing home’s on-call (non-staff) physical therapist, Joann Frieburg, was a violinist; when she learned about Littlejohn’s composition, she asked him to contact her when it was finished. Frieburg took it to Eric Scheider, who conducts the Jubilee Symphony Orchestra, at the Jubilee Community on Wall Street in Asheville. It premiered in 2017.

At the climax of The Dreamer, where Rev. King says, “Free at last, we’re free at last,” the voices climb the scale, aiming for heaven. Littlejohn says, “It’s a very dramatic ending. When it was performed, I had people kiss me on the cheek: physical therapy nurses, even men, kissing me on the cheek.”

Only one thing was missing. America is a melting pot, yet in the performance at Jubilee there were no black singers.

“I told Joanne Frieburg, the next time, for the next choir, as Dr. King said, we should all stand together. I want blacks, whites, Chinese, Gentiles, Jews, all together.”

That will be the fulfillment of Patrick Littlejohn’s dream.