Singer Mourns Loss of ‘Rare Bird’

Nine Decembers have come and gone since I last heard Tom Tipton’s baritone, the kind of voice that goes down easy. Back in 1995, we’d talked for a column that remains one of my favorites -- that of him, a shoeshine boy outside the White House in the 1940s who’d been invited 50 years later to sing gospel hymns in the White House.

Tipton’s voice still soothes and, yes, we had some laughs in reminiscing, but he knew I wasn’t calling Saturday for old time’s sake. Remembering he’d spent many a Sunday morning singing at the Crystal Cathedral, I figured Tipton knew Johnnie Carl, the church’s musical director who barricaded himself inside the cathedral on Thursday afternoon before shooting himself early Friday morning.

“I met Johnnie Carl the first day I came to the cathedral in 1979,” Tipton says. “The only person at the cathedral who would play for me was Johnnie Carl. He did all the arrangements, all my music. When he retired from the piano, the only person when he would play was for me. That was quite an honor. Outside of my own family and some members of the Schuller family, he was the closest person in my life, with his wife and family. I preached at his father’s funeral.”

Then, as if to put a coda to that thought, Tipton adds, “It’s been crazy, man.”

At 71, Tipton lives in Anaheim and still travels the world singing gospel. He last saw Carl a few weeks ago in a hospital where he was being treated for his mental illness. “Johnnie was a rare bird, man,” Tipton says. “He was handling it as best he could. Johnnie is a warm, fuzzy individual who cares. That’s why I loved him. He cared. About the music, the arrangements, the musicians, about everybody.”

An accomplished singer and his arranger can be business associates, but it’s better if each knows the other’s soul.

“Johnnie liked me because I was a little different,” Tipton says. “Singing to him, I sing a hymn a little different, and he’d do things to make the hymns stand out even a little more.”

In 1981, Tipton invited Carl to a Washington, D.C., church to join in a celebration for Tipton’s mother, a radio pioneer. “Johnnie had never been in a black church before. He looked like a mushroom in a pot of black coffee. He was scared to death.”

But Tipton recalls that Carl didn’t lose his uncanny knack for keeping up with the singer’s improvisatory style. “He started playing ‘His Eye Is On the Sparrow.’ I never knew where I was going, so how could anyone else? When I got to where I thought I might be, he’d always be there. He’d find his way to be there. He could feel me better than any pianist I’ve ever known.”

They brought down the house that day. “People in the back of the church started jumping, screaming, shouting. I leaped on a bench. Johnnie froze and kept playing. He was scared to death, but he could never stop. People were rolling on the floor of the Baptist church. He’d never seen that before. His face was white, it couldn’t get any whiter. That was Johnnie Carl.”

The stories could go on, of course.

Tipton was watching the news Thursday when the story broke. Because Carl wasn’t identified -- at police request -- Tipton didn’t know it was him. “If I had known, I’d have been in my car at the cathedral,” he says. “I’ll tell you right now I loved Johnnie Carl so much, I would have found a way to get in there. It may not have worked, but I would have tried my best because he believed in me as much as I believed in him.”

Tipton says he’ll remember a man who, next to family, loved music and the challenge of each week’s arrangements. Left untouched, Tipton says, are “all the incredible Sunday mornings we had with standing ovations and him beaming at me if he and I did a thing.”

Often followed, Tipton says, by Carl giving him a wink or a nod. “He’d say, ‘We pulled it off.’ ”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana .parsons@latimes.com.