This post did not go in the direction I initially intended. Well, let me revise that statement. I had intended to write about my husband's great uncle, Harry Leon Lantz, and I did...but not in the way I had planned.
In his time, Mr. Lantz was a well-regarded cellist, conductor, and music educator.
The article above gives his musical history up to 1969. He later became a professor of music at Peabody College of Music in Nashville, Tennessee, (now part of Vanderbilt University). In 1977, he became an associate professor for cello and the conductor of the Baylor Symphony Orchestra at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. My thought was that he had either released a couple recordings of cello music, or there were recordings of symphonies he had conducted. My intention was to locate one of them as my "record that adds color." And here's where things got a bit odd. A quick search did reveal that Harry Lantz recorded cello music on the RCA Victor and CRI labels, but that search also lead me to this Burt Reynolds record.
How did a search for Harry Lantz bring me here, you ask? I asked myself the same question, but as I scrolled through the page's information, I discovered a credit for one Harry Lantz on the strings. I thought to myself, "It must be a different Harry Lantz," as I searched for additional information on this album. The MusicRow website had little to say about it other than that Reynolds came to Nashville in 1973 to create Ask Me What I Am...and that the record was not a success. Nashville, Tennessee, is precisely where Harry Lantz was in 1973, but I still wasn't 100% convinced I had the right person until, upon further investigation, I discovered another Peabody College music professor, Samuel Terranova, had also loaned his talents to this record.
I started this post intending to leave the reader with some beautiful cello music. Instead, I will leave you with the link to a long forgotten country album featuring the vocals of Burt Reynolds...and the string contributions of Harry Lantz.
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