Bill Pearce

Bill Pearce (May 20, 1926 – February 23, 2010) was an American singer, solo trombonist, nationally syndicated broadcaster and inductee into the National Religious Broadcasters Hall of Fame.

William Jones Pearce was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on May 20, 1926.

His father was an itinerant Methodist minister with his own daily radio program, Christian Voices, which could be heard on WFIL, WIP and WCAM.

He gave the message, his mother played the piano and sang.

Bill, along with his brother and sister played together in a brass trio.

However, Bill Pearce started out with a totally different instrument in the beginning.

"My first interest in music really was grade school orchestra," he said; "they needed a clarinet player and whether I looked like one or not, I was chosen to play an old metal clarinet. I did not take to that instrument at all, and it just frustrated the dickens out of me. I finally got angry enough to throw it down on my mattress hard enough that I slightly bent it, so we had a repair bill to start out with."

The clarinet would be repaired at the local music shop and Bill's band teacher suggested that he might try a different instrument, the trombone.

At ten years old, Bill got his first trombone, "...an old King trombone for $20 at a local second hand shop," he says.

He began practicing with the aid of an old Victrola and a 78 rpm of John Philip Sousa marches.

His music teacher would come by once a week, and for his first lesson, tied the slide on his trombone so that Bill could not use it.

The whole idea was to have him focus on his tone, rather than the notes.

Bill's introduction to jazz came by way of a "very unusual recording" he heard one day:

"On one side of the disc was a recording of Knute Rockne, the famous football coach of Notre Dame, speaking – no, rather, yelling – at his team during halftime and they were losing, so you can imagine the energy there. However.... on the flip side of this funny old recording was a trombone solo by somebody named Tommy Dorsey. It was called 'I'm Getting Sentimental Over You.' Well, you know the rest of the story. I was absolutely intrigued by the sound this guy got on that old scratchy 78, so I thought, well, why can't that be me?"

Bill would continue playing and at 11 years old would begin studying with Donald Rheinhardt, famous for his "Pivot" system of mouthpiece placement.

"He was a clinician, a visionary, a pioneer, a trail blazer," recalls Pearce, "and all of the great musicians, both symphonic and jazz, as they came through Philadelphia, would come and spend a couple of hours with Don Rheinhardt."

Bill, himself, would spend less than a year with Rheinhardt.

"To tell you the truth I did not make out too well as a student of Don Rheinhardt," he says, "because I just felt that he was intimidating – my being so young and all – so I thought it was time to move on."

Bill made his debut performance on a nationally broadcast radio program in the summer of 1937 on Percy Crawford's radio show, recorded at Pinebrook summer camp (in the Poconos).

Bill, along with Percy's wife, Ruth, as an accompanist, played the song "He Lives" – "Two verses and an extra refrain in B flat – no variations", he recalls.

(Incidentally, a new Canadian singer by the name of George Beverly Shea was on the same program!)

He would study with two additional teachers before stopping formal lessons altogether.

The third teacher was his band instructor in high school.

"He was a military type and very strict about my doing everything it by the book," he recalls (by the way, the "book" in question was the Arban method!).

"When he would call me in for a lesson I would know that was pending so I would get about 5 minutes of cramming in to see what I could do with lip trills and making decent sounds and scales and things like that. He didn't dig that at all and finally he dismissed me, saying I wasn't serious enough, that he wanted to spend his time with musicians who really wanted to play."

His fourth teacher was his junior high school teacher who "encouraged me all over the place," he says.

"He gave me a solo to learn – he was trying to enter me into the state contest because he thought I showed some promise. I'll never forget that piece he gave me to play; it was called 'La Comparsita.' It was a Latin thing and I got kind of tired of that within 2 pages. I couldn't get into that at all, it was too technical, I thought, another planet for me. It just seemed too impossible, so I thought, well, I'll just try to do what comes to me naturally."

He then proceeded to spend time in the movie theater.

"Back in those days you could get into the theater for about 50 cents but you could stay all day," recalls Pearce.

"You would see the same movie, but between shows, as they were rewinding the reels, they had these name bands on stage doing a 20 or 30 minutes concert. The first time I heard Tommy Dorsey was when Gene Krupa was his drummer. It was completely dark in the theater and you heard those drums begin – it was Krupa doing a tom-tom solo, and before you knew it they were into 'Song of India.' I was totally mesmerized by the whole thing. Later Glenn Miller came through with his band and that was a precision unit if there ever was one. His brass players were right on the money, just amazing. So that's the kind of dream I had as a kid growing up."

He got to live that dream when he got a spot in Percy Crawford's brass quartet!

"As we were better known and got more invitations," he recalls, "we spread out from the Philadelphia area to New York, New England down to Baltimore and Washington DC and so on. That was good training for me – the first trumpet player was sort of a hero to me. He looked sharp, he combed his hair right, his glasses even looked good, dressed correctly, and was just a very clean person. His playing matched his image. So, I learned a lot about purity, how to form a beautiful tone and to play 'within limits!'"

About this time, World War II broke out, and many high school teenagers were being drafted and joining the army.

Bill had other ideas.

"Most people waited to be drafted and joined the Army. The Navy quota was full, and I decided I wanted to be a Marine like my father had been. He was a drill instructor and an officer at Parris Island (South Carolina) and at the officer training center in Quantico, VA during World War I. He used to tell me stories about the Marine Corps so, on the basis of that I went down one day and asked to enlist."

Bill enlisted and went through United States Marine Corps Recruit Training at Parris Island, South Carolina; 15 weeks of jungle training at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina; and another several weeks of training at Camp Pendleton, Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores, California.

He got shipped out to the 3rd Division, on the way to Iwo Jima and the Pacific, and was ready to go to war.

Unknown to him, at the time, his father was having a conversation with a few old war buddies, which would change his course.

"My father, having been in the service in World War I, knew some of the military people who had become generals later and one of his speaking engagements in Washington, DC found him over the Pentagon to look up some of his old buddies. As they discussed the old days, he said, 'I've got a son who's an army physician in the Army and a younger son who's in the Marine Corps down at LeJeune, shipping out.' They checked on me in the records and found I was indeed a machine gunner in the infantry, on the way to the Pacific."

He died at age 83 on February 23, 2010, from complications of Parkinson's disease.