When the Up With People Alumni Association held its recent annual 45th Reunion festivities in Arizona, one of the new events was the creation of an Up With People Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Not surprisingly, and most appropriately, the initial class of inductees includes the Colwell Brothers and Herb Allen, the true driving musical forces behind, first, Sing Out, and then the Up With People Show, as it swept across America and throughout the world in the mid-to-late 1960s....
As the Up With People Songwriters Hall of Fame continues to expand each year, I'd like to nominate a quartet of gentlemen to be inducted. All of them have strong ties to the original cast of Sing-Out South, and provided many memorable songs to both SOS and the national casts...
It begins with Bill Cates, who began his work with Sing-Out South by writing and producing many songs for our original premiere shows at Hillsboro High School in late March, 1966. That included several signature songs for the cast including "We Volunteer" and "Sing-Out South." Other pieces he created and (in some cases)performed for those early shows include "Get Up & Go", "We Refuse To Go To The Dogs" and "Let Our Voices Be Heard." Perhaps the most lasting work he wrote for SOS was a song later included in the Baptist Hymnal "Do You Really Care", performed so beautifully by the late Donna Dowthitt....
When Bill joined the national cast of Sing-Out, then Up With People, his creative talents continue to grow. He is credited with at least a dozen songs in a review of Up With People sheet music on line. Those songs include "Dawn Of The Morning Of Time," "The Wonder Of It All" (with his wife Linda Blackmore Cates), "John David Sebastian Smith", "A Memorable Tune" and many others, including one of my favorites, which we also performed in Sing-Out South, "Gee I'm Looking Forward To The Future"....
The other three former Sing-Out South members I would like to nominate to the Up With People Songwriters Hall of Fame can be seen from the photo above. They are The Volunteers from Cast C of Up With People in the late 1960s. They are, beginning second from the left, Ken Ashby, Dick Smith and Cabot Wade (George Brown is the other member of The Volunteers and he is first on the left in the photo).
Both Ken Ashby and Dick Smith were members of the Tennessee Tech Quartet in Sing-Out South, performing as you can see below (with Lee Piepmeier and Joe Capers) from one of our original shows....
Both Dick Smith and Cabot Wade have now once again become active with Up With People. That includes their work together as the WADE-SMITH band which provided the musical background for an alumni-based show (including the Colwells and Herb Allen) called "A Song For the World" which was performed in the summer of 2009 in Branson, MO. and may soon be taken on tour including a possible trip to Jamaica...
Dick Smith today
Dick Smith is credited with writing and creating a number of songs for Up With People. In addition to "Walk On Through" with Ken Ashby, he was also involved in either the lyrics or music of "It's Happening!", "How I Feel!", "I Get A Kick Out Of Life," "You Are What You Do," "Thinking About The Days Ahead," "A Thing To Do," and a song he wrote and we performed in Sing-Out South, "Let The Rafters Ring"....
Cabot Wade today
Cabot Wade was a member of the original trio in Sing-Out South called the Hickory Valley Trio.Here he is below in the center of the photo along with Eddie Lunn on the left and Ted Overman on the right (on bass). This photo was taken in June, 1966 on the evening when SOS was leaving for the national Sing-Out conference in Estes Park, CO...
After he joined the national cast of Sing-Out '66 and Up With People, Cabot wrote the lyrics for or provided the music for several songs. We've talked before about his song "Ashes" for example. His other songs include "Song Of The Soul" and Live It Live!"( both with Ken Ashby), along with two songs we did in Sing-Out South "Is There A Reason Why" and "The World Is Your Hometown".....
So that's a little taste of the musical talents of this quartet of Sing-Out South song writers. While I know there are others who deserve to be enshined as well in the new Up With People Songwriters Hall of Fame, I believe each of these guys do as well. Since some of their songs date from a period after many of the readers of this blog had moved on from active participation in Up With People, I will take some opportunities to provide some more samples here of their work in the future.
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