Walter Turnbull

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Dr. Walter Turnbull (19 July 1944 in Greenville, Mississippi - 23 March 2007) was an African American musician and the founder of the Boys Choir of Harlem. Turnbull graduated from Tougaloo College where he studied classical music and vocal performance.

He moved to New York City in 1968, and in addition to continuing his education at the Manhattan School of Music started to perform as a tenor with the New York Philharmonic. He also began teaching music at a Harlem church upon his arrival in New York. This church group eventually turned into a popular city choir and then eventually the internationally renowned Boys Choir of Harlem.

He died on March 23, 2007 in a New York City hospital. He had reportedly suffered a stroke months earlier.

[edit] Obituary

Walter J. Turnbull, who founded the Boys Choir of Harlem, died yesterday at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. He was 62.

The cause was cancer, said his brother Horace, the choir’s former executive vice president.

From modest beginnings in the basement of a church on 123rd Street, the choir went on to sing for presidents and popes. It has been celebrated around the world as much for its eclectic musical standards — a typical program ranged from Handel to spirituals, jazz and pop — as for being a symbol of bootstrap success in the ghetto, though the group has recently fallen on hard times after financial and managerial scandals.

Born to a poor family in rural Greenville, Miss., Dr. Turnbull won a music scholarship to Tougaloo College in Mississippi and, after graduation, moved to New York with dreams of being an operatic tenor. Cleaning toilets and driving cabs for a living, he also sang as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He was working toward a doctorate at the Manhattan School of Music when he started the choir as an after-school music program in the basement of the Ephesus Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1968.

Incorporated as the Boys Choir of Harlem in 1975, the group, which usually included about 150 boys, eventually spawned a 600-student school, the Choir Academy of Harlem, which offered a full academic program in grades 4 through 12. Reflecting Dr. Turnbull’s belief that musical training focuses the mind and helps any child succeed in life, the school had a strict dress code, and the choirboys always appeared clean-cut and disciplined. Dr. Turnbull also founded the Girls Choir of Harlem in 1988.

Dr. Turnbull received the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton in 1997 and many other honors, including being named to the New York Black 100 by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Despite its renown, the choir and the school had chronic financial shortages, racking up as much as $5 million in debts in recent years. In 2001, a complaint from a 14-year-old academy student that he had been sexually abused by the school’s chief counselor set in motion a chain of events that dismantled the school and weakened the choir.

In 2004, after a city investigation criticized Dr. Turnbull for not reporting the allegations of abuse, he was replaced as chief executive of the choir, though he was allowed to remain artistic director, and his brother was forced to leave. Two years later, citing the choir’s financial and management problems, the city evicted the choir and school from its building on Madison Avenue and 127th Street, where it had received free space since 1993. The school is now closed, and the choir has only about 50 members and a minimal volunteer staff.

Besides his brother Horace, of Nanuet, N.Y., Dr. Turnbull is survived by another brother, Sammy J. Turnbull, also of Nanuet, and a sister, Mary Webster of Atlanta.