A couple in harmony
There’s rarely a sour note for Brenham church’s musical team
BRENHAM — It all started with “Moon River.”
The year was 1963; the place, the piano parlor in a home in the Texas hills. At the ivories, fidgeting over Henry Mancini’s tune of two drifters off to see the world, was teenaged Martha Bledsoe, daughter of Dripping Springs’ new Baptist preacher. A few feet away, devouring every note was Robert Haydon, basketball-playing high school piano wiz, already dreaming of a concert hall career.
Robert, taking his turn at the keyboard, unleashed a Chopin polonaise. Martha swooned at his pianistic thunder.
Today, “Moon River,” with its sappy lyrics, long since has flowed out to sea. But that long-ago impromptu recital — performed at the urging of the musicians’ mothers, each desirous of sparking youthful romance — has spawned a marriage that has endured nearly half a century and a musical partnership known for its artistic breadth and brilliance.
On Aug. 30, the Haydons celebrated their 48th wedding anniversary. On Sept. 25, they will mark their 40th anniversary as organist and pianist at Brenham’s First Baptist Church with a free, dual-grand piano concert.
“They are a very unique and special couple in the way that they use their gifts,” said church music minister Charles Covin. “They have a very rare combination of ability and just the right kind of spirit and heart that you want to have in your worship leaders and accompanists.”
In addition to her pianistic du- ties at the church, which normally draws 500 people to Sunday services, Martha leads the congregation’s bell choir. In the secular community, she accompanies — and tours with — the Brenham Children’s Choir, of which she is a founder.
Robert, First Baptist’s organist, is a physician at Brenham’s Scott & White Clinic.
“This is our mode of worship,” Robert said. “I can’t sing, don’t sing while I’m playing. ... My musical interests are mainly instrumental. ... We’ve never considered ourselves
performers. We’ve always been church pianists and organists.”
Martha described the couple’s musical skill as “a gift from God.”
“My friends tell me, ‘you’re a celebrity,’” she said, “but we’re just an oddity — a couple that plays piano and organ.”
Music’s role in the Haydons’ lives is reflected in their home, where ebony baby and recital grand pianos stand back to back in a light-filled practice room. At ease, musical allusions fill their speech, and as they verbally sift through memories of their keyboard collaborations, the musicians often complete one another’s sentences.
Both remember the November day when their mothers — music-minded Addie Bledsoe and Willie Mae Haydon, who had led the Baptist church’s hunt for a new minister — engineered a bit of innocent match-making centered on the family upright.
“What attracted me to Robert,” his wife said, “was that he can do everything better than me.” Robert spluttered a protest, but Martha kept talking. “When he sat down and started playing that classical stuff, I said to myself, ‘Hmm, this guy’s good.’”
By that point, Martha — nine years into her piano studies — was pretty good herself.
“My mother’s family was very musical — they had a family quartet — and my mother mostly played piano,” she said. “Not gospel. Gospel music was not in our home. It was church hymns.”
Born in Waco, Martha spent much of her youth in Temple, where she mastered the rudiments of music under the tutelage of the formidable C.L. Darr, the pianist for the community’s Memorial Baptist Church.
“She was still left over from the 1950s,” Martha said, recalling her dated wardrobe, stern demeanor and honey red hair. “She was not real lovey-dovey. She was pretty strict.” Martha remembered herself as “such a nerd.”
“I studied, I read and I played the piano — that was just what my life was like,” she said.
In tiny Dripping Springs, 25 miles west of Austin, Robert grew up influenced by his mother, who possessed a tuneful alto voice. His father, civic leader, church deacon and garage owner Alva Haydon “couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.”
“We had an old upright piano in the house, and, when I was 5, I started picking out tunes by ear — ‘Mary had a Little Lamb,’ banging out something with my left hand,” he said. For six years, he took lessons from the church pianist, then from a classics-oriented instructor in Austin.
When the Haydon and Bledsoe families met for lunch, a prelude to the Rev. Bracy Bledsoe becoming pastor at Dripping Springs’ First Baptist Church, Robert and Martha “didn’t really mesh,” she recalled.
“Robert was just kind of nerdy,” she said. “So was I. I was so pitifully thin, a skinny thing. We didn’t really notice each other. He just kind of ignored me.”
The later parlor recital didn’t strike resounding romantic chords, either.
The couple sporadically dated through high school, then drifted off to college.
Martha landed at San Marcos’ Southwest Texas State University, where she majored in elementary education with specialization in music. Robert entered a pre-med program at the University of Texas after a senior UT piano professor warned him of the travails of a concert pianist’s life.
“He asked me how many concerts I had attended in the past year, and I said ‘one,” Robert said. “Then he asked how many movies I had seen. I told him I’d probably seen one a week. ... He told me I’d never be a concert pianist.”
That conversation, Robert said, signified divine intervention in his life.
At UT, then a university with an enrollment of 40,000, Robert “dated around a little bit.”
Then, as a junior, he said, he recognized “Martha was the one. I loved her. I realized she had everything I wanted in a person I would spend the rest of my life with. I’d been dating a drama major — she was always acting. I knew Martha always meant what she said.”
Robert telephoned Martha’s mother and received this alarming news: Martha was seeing another guy. “He’s very serious,” Addie Bledsoe told Robert. “Please come back.”
“I had tried to date other guys,” Martha said, “but it just wasn’t right. There wasn’t anyone I could be serious about. I guess I compared them to Robert.”
On the night Robert phoned Martha’s mother, Martha was out on a date. “They guy was on the rebound and he kept pushing and pushing and he was ready to give me a ring,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oh, boy, what am I going to do now?’”
When she learned of Robert’s call, she dialed his number. They decided to give it a chance.
Robert considers that coalescing of affection another sign of God’s hand in his life.
In December 1967, Robert and Martha became engaged. Martha hoped to devote a year to planning the wedding. Robert, then working in an Austin hospital laboratory was more decisive. He chose Aug. 30, the first day of 1968’s three-day Labor Day holiday. “It was the only time off I had,” he said. “We had a three-day honeymoon.”
After graduation, the couple moved to Galveston, where Robert enrolled in the University of Texas Medical Branch. Martha taught fourth grade at an island school. While in the city, they became involved in a Baptist church’s music ministry.
With their two young children in tow, the couple relocated to Brenham in 1976, where they quickly found a musical home at First Baptist.
“I always felt the Lord was calling me to do something special for him beyond just going to church,” Martha said. “I came to realize my special calling was to be a missionary and go to Africa. My calling was music — church music.”
The Haydons’ coming church concert will feature a variety of music on single piano, dual pianos and organ. The family’s 108-year-old Baldwin recital grand will be moved to the church for the event.
“This is to be a fun concert, and we’ll play things fun for us to play — and hopefully fun to listen to,” Martha said.
“We’ll have older hymn arrangements and some newer gospel numbers,” Robert added. “There will be a little jazz, Gershwin, ‘I’ve Got Rhythm.’” Maybe something Spanish.
“Martha is going to get on the piano with castanets.”
“I always felt the Lord was calling me to do something special for him beyond just going to church. I came to realize my special calling was to be a missionary and go to Africa. My calling was music — church music.” — Martha Haydon