Annual Voices of Praise reunion pays tribute to retiring director, long-time MC faculty member Larry Ervin
It was held under the auspices of the 30th reunion of Voices of Praise, the Maryville College praise and gospel choir, but last weekend’s banquet and performance was in reality a celebration of Larry Ervin ’97.
Ervin — who founded Voices of Praise in 1992 a year after his arrival at MC and who currently serves as director of the College’s Center for Diversity and Inclusion — will retire at the end of the 2021-2022 academic year. During a late Saturday afternoon ceremony, the warmth and love showered upon him by former and current students, choir members throughout the years and fellow faculty members was a stark contrast to the Dogwood Winter’s chill on the other side of the glass in the William Baxter Lee Foyer of the Clayton Center for the Arts.
“Among the awards Larry has received over the years is the Spirit of the Covenant Award, which recognizes individuals who embody the spirit of the principles of scholarship, respect and integrity as outlined in the College’s Covenant,” said College President Dr. Bryan Coker. “When presented this award in 2007, it was said of Larry that “he has been committed to honoring the worth, dignity and freedom of all students, faculty and staff on campus. As a valued part of this community, he is also committed to truth, honesty, dependability and responsibility in his actions and the actions of those whom he influences.
“‘Larry epitomizes the lifelong search for learning and intellectual creativity in all he accomplishes … and he continually blesses this community with his talents as an instrumentalist, as a vocalist and as a conductor.’ As we continue to undertake efforts to truly become a more diverse, equitable and inclusive community, those efforts would not be possible without the solid foundation he has provided.”
A lifelong connection to MC
Although his professional association with MC began in 1991, Ervin’s memories of the institution date back to his childhood, when as a student in the Alcoa City Schools system, he participated in various on-campus events.
“I think the first experience I participated in was a spelling bee that was then in the old Wilson Chapel,” Ervin said. “I ran track around the football field back in the day, representing Alcoa High School, and as a musician, my band played in a ‘battle of the bands’ in the Alumni Gym before it was renovated, so there’s a history there.”
After graduation, he attended Berea College and landed in Clemson, South Carolina, where he remained for a decade before returning to East Tennessee. In 1990, after searching fruitlessly for meaningful work, he decided to finish the degree he never obtained at Berea and inquired about enrollment at Maryville College.
“I decided to go up and just see what could be done, and Martha Hess ’67 (who served as MC registrar for 35 years) took me under her wing,” he said. “She met me at the desk in the registrar’s office, and she and the late Annabelle Libby ’52 — who was over transfer students at the time — they hooked me up with a financial aid package that was out of this world, man. I decided it was better for me to come to school than to keep carrying mortar and bricks!”
He enrolled as a student that fall, and the following spring he went to work for the College as the residence hall director for the College’s Gamble Hall, under the supervision of Dr. Sue Wyatt, the College’s vice president for student development at the time. Wyatt joined the assembled crowd at the Voices of Praise reunion and shared a number of good-natured memories about the Wild West nature of the first-year men’s dormitory, to which Ervin brought a semblance of order, she said.
“Gamble Hall was a little bit of a zoo, and I was in a season of prayer, because we had run through any number of … residence directors, and I knew I was going to have to find somebody else for the fall,” Wyatt said. “When I met Larry and he started telling me his story, I thought, ‘This is what Gamble Hall needs.’ It was a match made in heaven.”
A spiritual leader, choir director and friend
Steady. Sturdy. Stern, tempered by a kindness and a sense of humor that bursts through his stoic exterior in the most unexpected of moments: These are the traits of Ervin that one student and former student after another extolled about Ervin, each of them painting a portrait of a man who became a surrogate sibling, father figure and pastor in addition to choir leader during their time at MC.
It was Wyatt and Leslie Potts Nier ’71, former director of Campus Life at MC, who pushed him in that direction, he added. As a lifelong musician, he directed the Black Music Ensemble at Berea College, and upon returning to East Tennessee rejoined the music ministry of his childhood church. In the summer of 1991, he invited Wyatt and Nier to a worship concert at that church, and Wyatt brought along her father, he remembered.
“She told me, ‘He’ll probably want to stay for just half of it, and then we’ll have to leave,’ but later on she said he got indignant when she asked him about leaving because he was enjoying it so much!” Ervin said. “Sue was just amazed at the talent, the range of music, that the choir did, and as soon as she saw me that Monday, she told me I needed to start a choir here on campus.”
When Voices of Praise was established in 1992, there were roughly 25 inaugural members, Ervin said, as well as a handful of faculty members. Although his campus responsibilities grew parallel alongside the choir’s local and regional popularity — he took on administrative duties for minority services to a full-time minority services liaison to director of Multicultural Affairs, where he assisted in student programming efforts for a number of minority organizations, including the Black Student Alliance and Voices of Praise. In his current role as director of the Center for Diversity and Inclusion, he guides efforts to support students from marginalized and underrepresented populations through on-campus sponsorship of programming, seminars, concerts, plays, lectures and recognition programs.
“Students of color haven’t had to be in Voices of Praise for Larry to hear their voices,” Coker said. “He’s heard their voices and their perspectives in so many other ways: the Erskine Tutorial Foundation, serving as an advisor to the Black Student Alliance, facilitating important conversations on this campus.”
“With Larry as a part of what we were doing, we began to build a home for a whole array of students on this campus, and offering on this campus an opportunity for us all to express love and faith and care for one another,” Wyatt added. “There’s not enough time to tell you how much Larry Ervin changed my life and changed our little corner of the world at Maryville College.”
Voices of Praise’s impacts reach far and wide
There were, however, other corners of the world that Voices of Praise impacted. After being established for several years, the choir started making tour stops up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and wherever they went, Ervin said, the reception was always warm. From a standing performance in Woodstock, Georgia, that drew fans from Atlanta, to performing in an AIDS ward and to homeless citizens in New York, the students of Voices of Praise felt led to sing, and Ervin made sure they understood the deeper connections they had to the music, especially students of color.
“In my classes, in rehearsals, I would talk about the history of the music: the standout authors, where the music came from, and how it reflected our history and was a source of comfort for a community,” hew said. “I taught them how the rhythms came from Africa, and how even the enunciation of the lyrics reflects our ancestors’ way of speaking English, and how we should be proud that we can share such a gift.”
And those gifts, he added, have long been colorblind: There were lean years when there were more white or Asian students than Black ones in Voices of Praise, and he chuckles at the puzzled looks of some tour patrons who came expecting to hear a gospel choir but feared it would be something different when they saw the racial makeup. It never was, and by the end of those performances, the music had done more to unify congregants and singers than any sermon could have.
“I really feel that in the churches where we worshiped, we taught the congregations that the Lord can use anybody to worship and praise him,” he said. “So many of our white students, a lot of them recognized the music that we did but didn’t know its history, its connection to black gospel or rhythm and blues. So many of them were appreciative of hearing the truth, but then we would go out and spread the truth.
“We would walk in churches where nobody knew us, but by the time we left, we were all family through the music and through the spirit that the Lord blessed us to have and to share.”
