Otis Forrest



      Three-time Grammy Award nominee and veteran producer, arranger, and pianist Otis Forrest credits the Lord for his success. "I would be nothing without Jesus Christ," Forrest said, in an interview with The Christian View. "I owe all of my ability to Him. Scripture says, in James, that every good and perfect gift comes down from above, and that is true. Music certainly is a gift, a good and perfect gift. You can go only so far with hard work, but, if you have a God-given talent and work yourself ‘to the ground’, you can do anything. I hope that, when I get to heaven, Jesus will say that I have done well with what He gave me."
      Forrest began playing piano at the age of nine. His parents, Charles ‘Charlie’ Otis Forrest, Sr. and Fleda Gilstrap Forrest, told him that he showed interest in music even earlier. "My father and some of his friends knew about five or six chords on a guitar, and they would get together and play," he said. "I would watch, curiously, at an early age."
      At the age of 13, Forrest was asked to play piano for a Gospel quartet, the Pilgrimaires, formed in his hometown of Easley, South Carolina. They sang and played at churches locally and in North Carolina and Georgia.
      He studied with the same piano teacher, Barbara Stuckey, through his eleventh grade in high school.
      He left college after one year at Clemson. "I thought I could make a living in the music business," he said. "Fortunately, I was able to. I started playing in church. I played organ and then piano at Smith Grove Baptist Church, a little wooden frame shotgun building. I would play for soloists and quartets. I took organ lessons from Carolyn Hamlin, who is a very good organist."
      Not long after he, as piano player, and four singers, Tom Brown (baritone), Joel Duncan (bass), Bobby Edwards (tenor), and Carl Whitman (lead), formed a Gospel quartet called The Trav’lers, they were asked to be regulars on Bob Poole’s Gospel Favorites. 
      Poole, a disc jockey for WFBC Radio who also worked for WFBC-TV (now WYFF-TV), started the Gospel music program, televised Sunday mornings. "He started with local talent," said Forrest. "They did some advertising, and it grew by leaps and bounds.
      "After the program had been on for about six months, he advertised a free Sunday afternoon singing at Greenville Memorial Auditorium, with the groups that were on the television program, and the place overflowed. I still remember it quite well. 
      "From there, he got everybody, The Statesmen Quartet, The Blackwood Brothers, The Speer Family, The Harmoneers, The LeFevres, everybody you think of. He wouldn’t have them all at one time, but he usually had one of those big groups, sometimes two, every week. It got really big, and he started syndicating it, coast to coast."
      When The Trav’lers would visit a church to sing, the church would be filled, and people would be outside, listening to the singing from the sounds of the public address system from the open windows. "It’s amazing what the popularity of a t.v. show will do," Forrest said.
      "We were all young. When we recorded the first time, I was 19, and the oldest guy was 24. We were doing well, and we stayed pretty busy and traveled as far as Florida, Virginia, and all around the East Coast. We made a stint at going full-time professionally, and we were plenty good enough to do it, but we were all musicians and singers, and we really didn’t have a businessman, so we had a tough time with that. By that time, I was married, with one child, and I decided I was going to have to leave the group."
      He began working in a local mill, and was moving up in the company, but then, in 1967, when the piano player resigned for the Spartanburg-based Blue Ridge Quartet (Elmo Fagg, Fred Daniel, Bill Crowe, and Burl Strevel), Forrest was asked to join the group. "They hired me, and I worked with them through1968," he said. "By that time, I had three daughters, three beautiful little girls. Things weren’t going well in my marriage, and my being gone complicated it. I gave up that job, with the Blue Ridge Quartet, which was a good job. I was making about $800 a week, but went to Mark V Recording Studio in Greenville for $150 a week. I tried to salvage my marriage, but I wasn’t able to. I was awarded custody of the girls, and I raised Ann, Amy, and Alison."
      In 1971, he met the woman who would become his second wife, Sharon Reynolds, a singer from West Virginia, who came to Mark V to record. "A promoter from Connecticut, whom I had met when I was with The Blue Ridge Quartet, had come and recorded with me a couple of times," he explained. "I was producing, arranging, writing for orchestra, playing piano, and mixing. He sent her down and paid for her to record two songs. She was an excellent singer and a regular on the Wheeling, West Virginia Jamboree, which was like the northeast Grand Ole Opry."
   They married December 2, 1972. With her son and daughter, and his three daughters, they suddenly became a family of seven. When Sharon learned that she was expecting, she told her husband to prepare to have a son. "Bless her heart, we had two," he said. "Shannon was born in 1973, and Christian came along in 1977. So, then, we had seven children. 
      "By that time, I had left Mark V. She had encouraged me to go into business for myself. I didn’t have any money. I was making a living to support that big crowd. But I found a man with whom I had worked at Mark V who had access to money. He got the money to finance a recording studio, which I built on Highway 153. I was going to church at Calvary Hill Baptist Church in Easley at the time, and I knew a man there who was a construction foreman in Greenville. The company had laid him off, so I was able to hire him. He knew how to build, and I knew what I wanted to build. I designed it. It was about 4,000 square feet, and we fabricated it with old barn board to make it look like an old place. We did that in 1975. People followed me from where I used to be, when they found out where I was. We were able to make a living. We had miraculous times when we needed to have a recording, because money would be tight, and somebody would call and come in, to make a recording. 
      "I was doing a lot of work for people in Nashville at that time. They would send orchestra work from Nashville down to me. I used the Atlanta Symphony for my strings and my brass, and I could put strings and brass on much more cheaply than could Nashville, which, at that time, was strictly Union. 
      "Somewhere along 1984, the players in Nashville got together with the Union and said, ‘We’re holding to Union wages, and we’re starving.’ The short story is they lowered the wages, and my business fell off, because people in Nashville didn’t have to send work down to South Carolina. So, we decided we needed to move to Nashville.
      "We sold that place in 1987. I really hated to sell it. We probably should have left before then, but, when you have built something with your own hands, and it’s dear to your heart, it’s a tough decision to leave. Finally, I made the decision, and we left."
      In October of 1987, the Forrests purchased a home in Hendersonville, Tennessee, a 20-minute drive from Nashville. The large basement, with a nine-foot-high ceiling, was perfect for use as a recording studio. "By Thanksgiving, I was working on the studio," Forrest said. "I had a client who would come to see me every January and do a project. We were scrambling to get the studio done. We made it."
      The Forrests lived in Nashville for the next 15 years. "It worked really well until my wife passed away, in 2002," he said.
      After their youngest child, Christian, was born, in 1977, Sharon’s doctor advised her to have surgery due to the presence of abnormal cells. "She was afraid to do it," Forrest said. "I thought she should do it, but she did not do it.
      "She would have problems about twice a year with some kind of severe infection. That went on and seemed to get worse and worse, and she developed cancer. 
      "That was probably working in her from 1977. After we were in Nashville, it was discovered she was getting worse. A couple of cancer doctors said, ‘You need to have a radical hysterectomy, radiation, and chemotherapy,’ but she wouldn’t do it. When it finally got so bad, she did, but it was too late. It had gotten into her lymph glands and lungs.
      "She passed away peacefully. I’ve never seen another person die. But she was ready to die, and she had been sleeping for a long time."
      Sharon passed away on Thanksgiving Day.
      "We had Thanksgiving dinner," he recalled. "My mother-in-law, my daughter Andrea, who lived five minutes away, and my youngest son, Christian, were there at our home, around her bed. She was sleeping. She had been hoping to see Shannon, who lived an hour from us, south of Nashville. When Shannon came, Christian tapped her on the cheek, shook her a little, and woke her up and said, ‘Mother, Shannon is here.’ Shannon hugged her, and she smiled. Fifteen minutes after that, we were all sitting there, and she stopped breathing. There was no struggle. She breathed her last breath.
      "After my wife died, it was not too long until Andrea moved, because her husband was transferred to St. Louis with his job." With no family living close by, Forrest returned to Easley, still home to his mother and his younger brother, David, and his family. "I think I moved down here because this was where I was born, and there was really nothing to keep me in Tennessee," he said.
      Forrest now writes scores for the orchestra at his church.
      He advises young musicians to work hard on their craft and to have patience.
      "First of all, don’t think you’re going to go anywhere quickly," he said. "Second, don’t think that you can go anywhere without working yourself like a fanatic. I realize I was born with patience. Some people have said to me, ‘You must have the patience of Job.’ In working with the recording studio and doing my own engineering, I worked with singers, and, sometimes, you would have to take line after line over. One of the things that helped me was that any group that came to me sounded better than they did before I recorded them, because I worked hard to get their flat parts corrected.
      "One of the biggest problems I think that some young musicians today have is they seem to think they don’t have to know anything about music. One of my favorite sayings is ‘Knowledge equals power.’ Nowhere is that greater than in music. The more knowledge you have of music, the more power you will have. I know fellows who can play a little guitar, play a little piano, but they don’t know anything about music. That will stop you every time, if you have the desire to become a professional. I also believe in the ‘five p principle’: Proper preparation prevents poor performance. 
      "With all of the scores I’ve written, I don’t ever go to the piano. I know what all of those notes sound like. I know exactly what it will sound like when the orchestra plays it. In all Gospel songs I play, I know the words. I don’t play anything without the words going through my head, note to note. The words formulate what I do.
      "I would like to be remembered as the kind of person who never looked down on any person or any talent. I admire any amount of talent a person has, and I always encourage them. I would like to be remembered for that, and I would like to be remembered for my patience, and my work ethic."
      Forrest said that he has many favorite songs, but he especially favors the music of Fanny Crosby. 
      "I heard a story about her," he said. "This gives me goose bumps to start to tell it. Someone asked her, ‘When you get to heaven, how will you know Jesus? You’ve been blind your whole life. You’ve never seen a painting of Him. Are you sure you’ll know Him?’ She said, ‘Oh, I’ll know Him, all right. I’ll know Him by the nail prints in His hand.’
      "She wrote that song: I shall know Him, I shall know Him, when redeemed by His side I shall stand, I shall know Him, I shall know Him, by the print of the nails in His hand. She was an incredible writer, and "I Shall Know Him" is one of my favorites.
      "I think the greatest writers of our time are Bill and Gloria Gaither. 
      "I’ve had the privilege of working with them a lot. I’ve probably played on 200 songs for them, at least, and I played on and arranged their latest Christmas album, in 2004. I was in approximately 20 Homecoming videos. I arranged and conducted the orchestra for the Grammy Award-winning Kennedy Center Homecoming video.
      "Their music will last. It’s already proven that. You can describe their music writing pretty simply—wonderful, unique lyrics with a simple melody. He and especially Gloria have a marvelous way with the English language. 
      "One of their songs that is not widely known is "Redeeming Love." I’ve recorded it and produced it, and I love it. It goes, Redeeming love, a love that cannot fail, my soul shall sing through the endless ages, with choirs extolling this great love on high. They could have said ‘singing’, but ‘extolling’ is deeper. Their music is full of that. They choose wonderful lyrics."
      Forrest has long been a fan of Gospel music. He remembers as a teenager in 1960 going to a singing held at the Greenville Memorial Auditorium, with Hovie Lister and the Statesmen, James Blackwood and the Blackwood Brothers, and the Speer Family. "I loved those groups," he said. "I had heard them on the radio, but had never seen them in person before." 
      In later years, Forrest played piano for some of those same groups, and more, including the Statesmen, the Blackwood Brothers, the Cathedrals, the Kingsmen, the Inspirations, and many others.
      Since he began recording in 1963, he has recorded and/or produced about 3,000 albums, he said. 
      He has also played piano for many people he has produced, people from all across the United States, some who have driven from as far away as California to record with him.
      One influence on a young Otis Forrest was Nashville piano player Bill Purcell, whom he had heard on the radio. 
      "One of my biggest desires was to meet him," Forrest said. "In 1967 and 1968, when I was with the Blue Ridge Quartet, we recorded for Canaan Records out of Waco, Texas, and all of our Canaan music was recorded in Nashville. So, the first time I went to Nashville with them, I asked to have Bill Purcell playing organ, and that’s where I got to meet him. 
      "After the session, he invited me to his home, and we talked about the music business until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. 
      "He was a hero. I picked up some of the flairs that I have, particularly with the Christian music, from him."
      Other musical influences included Floyd Cramer, Roger Williams, and Joe Sample.
      Forrest has also always had a love for jazz music, which has influenced his recordings, setting his piano playing apart with added chords.
      A big Clemson Tiger fan, he recalled an idea he had, in the middle of the night one night in 1977, to record Tiger Rag differently. The six-minute version of "Tiger Rag" using the Atlanta Strings and Brass sold 20,000 copies.
      For his work with children’s music, he has been nominated three times for a Grammy Award.
      But Gospel music remains a lifelong love. 
      The Trav’lers are still together as a group, with the original bass singer and original baritone, and based in Greenville. The original lead singer now lives in North Carolina, and the original tenor now lives in Georgia, Forrest said. 
      Forrest recently rejoined the group for a benefit concert for Joel Duncan, the original bass singer, who was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year and is undergoing treatment. 
      Forrest’s favorite verses from scripture include Philippians 4:13, I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me, and Joshua 1:8: This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success. "I love the Psalms," he added. "My Bible reading habit was a chapter in Psalms and a chapter in Proverbs and a chapter in the New Testament."
      Forrest was saved in an Oliver B. Greene meeting at a Greenville church and later, in 1977, recommitted his life to the Lord.
      "Besides the eternity question, which is paramount, if you want to have a really good, lasting quality of life, and a good marriage, you’ve got to live by Christian principles," he said, adding, "The Lord has never done anything except good for me. I’ve never seen the righteous forsaken, or His seed begging for bread."