Interview Transcript
Bryan Lindsay was in his very early ‘30s when he wrote to Bernstein from his family home in Nashville, Tennessee. Bryan passed away some time ago, but I tracked down his son Jason via the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, in which Jason plays double bass. He invited his sister Alyson to join our conversation, which we arranged for February 2025.
They painted a rich picture of their father’s voracious interest in the arts, which was manifested in everything from songwriting in Nashville, through his doctoral study at Peabody, to arts festivals. And I particularly enjoyed the vivid description they gave of his prolific letter-writing at his typewriter, which really brought an earlier era and its technologies to life.
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Dear Mr. Bernstein,
It was my great pleasure this evening to watch your birthday tribute to Igor Stravinsky, brought to us via local TV. May I congratulate you for a truly worthwhile service to the music lovers of our country, both children and adults. I have long followed this series of concerts and have found them to be both aesthetically stimulating and educational. This is a rare attribute in this day and time.
May I ask you one question, however, regarding a point which you made this evening? In discussing Stravinsky’s neoclassical period, you made reference by comparison to Mozart, Bach and Handel. It has been my understanding that Bach and Handel represent the Baroque, or pre-classical period in the evolution of musical form and style. Perhaps you might refer me to a source which would clarify this point, please?
Again may I offer you my sincere appreciation for a necessary job extremely well done. Were it possible, I would like to see this series of Young People’s Concerts offered on a much more frequent basis. My young son, Evan, five years old, is developing a keen interest in various forms of program music and he was moved by the masteral narration which you presented.
Wishing you Godspeed in your future endeavors, I remain
Respectfully yours,
Bryan Lindsay
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Jason: My dad’s mom is from London.
Alyson: Yeah, we have relatives in L… or England. I don’t know if it’s in London. But I’m going to go with … I really don’t know the education level of his parents. His dad was, like, a steamboat captain. His mother came over from England. I don’t know that they had any kind of college, like, post-secondary, or I don’t … I don’t know. I’m just saying that.
Jason: I don’t know, either. I would say I bet that grandma had a bachelor’s degree.
Alyson: Yes.
Jason: She …she was an enormous person. She was six feet tall.
Alyson: She was a big woman. She was tall.
Jason: She had huge hands, and I think her ring size was 11.
Alyson: And she was an artist.
Jason: She played keyboards. She played piano. She played organ and, yeah, we think it’s kind of a tragic story about my dad’s dad, because I think he got toned out of a lot of what he should have had in terms of the earnings and his status in life. He was the skipper of a private yacht, called the Arcadia.
Alyson: It was a steam boat.
Jason: It was owned by this very wealthy family in Canada. That’s what he did. And that’s a very, very prestigious job in the 1930s. Unfortunately, the Canadian Navy conscripted the boat. So he lost that job. He was too old to be drafted. Then I think he went to work for the merchant Marine or something like that. But he was in a position to probably be a wealthy man, and that never panned out for him.
Alyson: Yeah.
Jason: You know, and Grandma, so they ended up retiring to Alabama and running literally an old folks home, a place where for the community where the old people could come, and they did that for 30 years. It was a long time. That’s really all we ever knew that they ever did at the time that we were born.
Alyson: Grandma, though had, I don’t know if it was affiliated with a church or a senior citizens like a centre. She did a lot of art classes. And would do all jewellery. I remember painting … I have one here, like plates plates that they painted, little ceramics. So that is what she did. That’s what I remember her doing as … Granddaddy, I don’t think, Grandaddy Lindsey, I think, just I don’t know what his hobbies or interests were as an older person, except for being fussy. He was fussy.
Jason: Yeah, I would say the art came from Mom.
Alyson: Yeah.
Jason: Much more Grandma than Grandpa.
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Alyson: At Troy – he went to Troy University – he was the drum major. But he could play … my dad could play anything. That’s the truth. He could play any kind of instrument. Not a string instrument. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard him play a guitar or a band … percussion, marimbas and things like that, he could play.
Jason: He cut his teeth with saxophone and the vibraphone, which is a mallet percussion instrument. But I think I mean, his passion was jazz. My dad was not what you call a classical legit musician.
Alyson: Yeah, he played with several different jazz ensembles as a young man. We have pictures of that.
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Alyson: His first job here was with the Choctawhatchee High School choral director. That was like his first job. And then, as he got older, I do think it went into music. I’m going to say it wrong, Jay, like art history, music theory, things like that. But his first job was a choral director at Choctaw, which is a huge … and he wrote a bunch of fight songs. Like, the fight song our high school uses is the one he wrote. Choctawhatchee – the fight song they use is the one he wrote. And this has been 50, almost, good Lord …
Jason: 70 years.
Alyson: 60 years.
Jason: So our father in the ’60s, after he got his degree and his doctorate, he was in Nashville, right? The family lived there. And, you know, life brings you down the road, and there’s a very common saying here nowadays is there’s a fork in the road. And our dad was at that point.
He was actually writing songs … for major recording artists in Nashville. And he was getting traction. He was a lyricist. And he worked with a composer named Alf Bartels. And they were getting their songs recorded by people like Johnny Mathis, who was a megastar, and Andy Williams, who did one of my dad’s songs live on his TV show.
And I will never forget we all sat around the TV and Dad says, ‘He’s going to sing my song, he’s going to sing my song!’ And we all sat there, sure enough, here comes Andy Williams. And this song was never really released on the radio, but at that point, if my father had probably stuck it out and kept writing songs, he probably would have written a couple of mega hits. And once you do that, your phone rings for many, many, many years, right? You only need to write one or two big hits. And he was getting really, really close.
But I think he said, ‘It’s a lot more safe just to go be a professor’. And so, instead of staying in Nashville and him pursuing that to be a songwriter, we moved back to Florida and his songwriting waned 1965-1975. And after 1975, even though he was still the same creative person, he wasn’t writing songs really much anymore.
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Jason: Our parents like to watch TV. They were … Dad had a spot…
Alyson: He would think of like the Ed Sullivan Show, things like that. You know, I’m trying to think if there was I can’t … I can’t think of a like, something I know for sure we tuned in every week, that kind of thing, or that they watched on their own … but TV wasn’t like that anyway – it was more family oriented, so.
Jason: Yeah, we would definitely watch TV as a family because Mom would be on one end of the sofa, and she was a math teacher, so she would be grading papers. And dad would be on the other end of the sofa. And you know, we never had arguments about what to watch. It was whatever, you know, they had their things and we would watch. We watched TV. I mean, definitely five days a week week. Yeah, we watched TV.
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Jason: And then when you sent me the letter, I shared it with my family just so everybody could see it because, you know, dad didn’t go around saying, ‘Hey, I just sent this letter to Leonard Bernstein’. He just did it, right? And that was the way he was.
Alyson: It was for him. He did it for himself, not to make us think anything. I think the letter writing is ’cause there was no there was no internet. There was no email. You know what I mean? Letter writing was the form of communication that people did. And he was really curious and interested in artists and creative thinkers. So I do think it was part of his own growth to communicate with these people.
Jason: I would add that probably, you know, he was an academic. Obviously, you know, so he was not … he was used to sitting down at the typewriter and banging out papers. And I think I’m a lot like him in the way that you have an idea, you better act on it right then and right there. So if you have the idea for the letter, you don’t wait. ‘Oh, I’ll write the letter next week. He’d go sit down, baba ab, ab, ab, ab, you know, using two fingers. And the next thing, you know, the letter was in the mail.
And my gut feeling is that he started writing letters because when you’re trying to get in touch with someone like Leonard Bernstein, you can’t just get him on the phone, right? So you send him a letter. And he would write a lot of people that, you know, you remember, we’re talking about late ’50s, early ’60s, people that unless you’re a fan of, like, comic strips, you might not even know who they are in 2025, right? Most of them have passed away.
But I imagine once he started getting a few answers to his letters, he was like, ‘Oh. This works. I’m going to send more letters’. Because it wouldn’t take him long to knock one out. As you can see, the letter he wrote probably took him 2 minutes to type. But kindred spirits connect. So, you know, he wrote something and evidently Leonard Bernstein thought enough of the letter to respond.
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Jason: Definitely, he was typewriting his letters, and most of his correspondence…
Alyson: Well, his handwriting his handwriting was really, really … would be really difficult to read for a lot of … it really was. So I’m sure the typewriter allowed him to actually send something that could be read.
Jason: Yeah. It’s funny because I’m looking at it and you can see, you know, to see the vintage, old typewritten … you can even see all the problems with the typewriter. The E’s and the G’s aren’t really very good, you know, I mean, that’s just … that’s classic. Because I would wager – I don’t know what happened – but I know that … that typewriter was in my bedroom, and I grew up as a kid, and we weren’t using it anymore, right? But no doubt. Who had…?
Alsyon: I have the typewriter.
Jason: Oh, okay. There you go.
Alyson: My guest bedroom up on a dresser drawers, but I love it. It’s a beautiful …
Jason: This thing you could knock somebody out with it. It’s, you know, it weighs 20 pounds. It’s that classic grey flannel … I mean, literally, the sound of that typewriter in our house was a constant there for quite a few years. You would just get tick-a-tick-a-tick-a
Alyson: He’s not kidding. I was like tick-a-tick-a…
Jason: Yeah, our dad used two index fingers to type. He didn’t … wasn’t … he played saxophone. He used all his fingers for that, but when he was typing, it was just the two fingers.
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Alsyon: Peabody. Peabody is where he got his doctorate.
Jason: Yes, so that’s why I’m thinking he was at the typewriter all the time at this point of his life, probably cranking out his dissertation and doing all the classwork for that. And I’m looking at the letter, and somehow my dad he had a little typo spelling Bernstein’s name. He was probably a little nervous, I’m guessing when he did it, you know, because he has he B-E-R and T and then went back and hit an S over the T. And it’s just that’s kind of a funny little … I don’t see any other typos in the whole thing, but I bet he was a little nervous even writing the letter.
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Alsyon: And whatever school he ever taught at, every college he ever taught at, he started an arts festival. Any kind of artist that was wanting to be included was included. He did the same thing at where we live in Spartanburg. He did Sunday or Saturday in the Park, J, which is it?
Jason: Uh, just Jazz in the Park.
Alsyon: Jazz in the Park. Yeah. He always promoted and organised.
Jason: He would do stuff just to enhance the neighbourhood and the city. And if I don’t think he ever got paid for much of this stuff, but he did it because…
Alyson: I don’t think he got paid for any of it. I’m sure he just did it. That’s my thought. It was just something he was passionate about. I don’t think any of these …nothing like this had ever happened. Especially, I can remember a young person myself going to the arts festival. I just think he wanted people to know … expose them to as much different culture as you say, or the creative arts as he could. I do think that was his motivation, like, you know, if we don’t put it out there, they’re not going to know.
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Jason: Bernstein was a little younger. And this is an era when the older guys, the Stokowskis and the older, you know, legendary, walking … the geniuses weren’t doing what Bernstein was doing, which was trying to bridge the gap to the younger generation. So I would say my dad had the absolute utter highest regard and admiration for Leonard Bernstein. I mean, they were … no one’s repeated it.
You know, I mean, Bernstein set the bar, and what I really love about it is that he talked to kids like they could handle concepts. He didn’t water it down and make it like, you know, a little oatmeal mush. He actually had them thinking very lofty ideals, which we really … that ship has sailed, you could say.
I would say my dad thought that Leonard Bernstein was one of the gods on this earth, and any way he could connect with the guy, he was up for it. So that’s how I think my dad would have thought of Leonard Bernstein: totally worshipped the ground the guy walked on. So this letter is just a very small piece of evidence that would support what I think he believed in and felt towards the guy.