July 30, 1906-October 29, 1985
Joseph Richards could have enjoyed an international career as an accompanist for world-class singers.
He was a gifted pianist and music teacher for whom musicians and singers had the greatest regard.
A graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, Richards received several offers to work overseas—including one from Roland Hayes, the first African-American man to achieve international acclaim as an opera singer.
However, Richards felt he had a duty to nurture homegrown talent. In the 1930s, during the early years of his career, there were few Bermudian musicians who had achieved his level of education.
Even though he would have received more recognition and greater financial rewards working abroad, he never regretted his decision.
Richards was the first music teacher at The Berkeley Institute, where he had a salaried position for 23 years, and also taught for four years on a voluntary basis.
For more than 35 years, he taught piano and voice at his music studio on Burnaby Street, Hamilton. Among his students were working musicians such as Lance Hayward, Clarence “Tootsie” Bean and Al Harris.
Five of his Berkeley students became professional musicians overseas. They include Dr. Gary Burgess, who credits Richards with laying the foundation for his successful career as an opera singer and music professor. Another success story was Cecil Smith, who became a school music teacher and a church organist in Bermuda.
Richards, who was born and bred in Somerset, had music in his bloodlines. His father, Reuben Smith Richards, played a variety of musical instruments, taught violin and was choirmaster at Allen Temple AME Church.
Joseph was the youngest of Reuben and Lillian Richards’ three sons, all of them musically inclined. His eldest brother Deveau was a jazz drummer, while Vivian was director of St. Luke’s AME Church men’s choir. An uncle, Joseph Tucker, who sang bass, encouraged Richards to study piano. But by all accounts, Richards’ prodigious musical talent emerged early in his childhood.
Richards’ first music teacher was Ida Trott, whose private primary school on Sound View Road he attended until the age of 10. Trott was an Englishwoman who married into a Bermuda family. Richards remained close to “Granny Trott” all her life.
Richards’ move to West End School brought further opportunities for his music development. West End’s Jamaican-born headmaster C.A. Isaac-Henry excelled as a teacher of singing. At the age of 13, Richards became a student teacher and assistant to the school pianist.
At Berkeley Institute, he took on a similar role, playing the piano at morning assembly and at school concerts.
During his high school years, he played piano at community concerts and for silent movies, and also at dances and small hotels as a member of the Happy Five. While he played jazz for those engagements, he would eventually focus exclusively on classical music.
It was his experience with a later teacher, a Mr. Gilberthorpe, an organist at the Anglican Cathedral, that brought him face to face with the harsh reality of segregated Bermuda.
Gilberthorpe was preparing Richards to sit a Royal School of Music exam, but encountered disapproval from whites for teaching a black student. Richards passed the exam, and Thorpe was said to have lost his position.
That episode left Richards with a burning determination for black Bermudians to have as good a music teacher as could be found anywhere.
Richards entered Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music armed with a recommendation from Gilberthorpe, a man Richards would, many years later, describe as “one of nature’s gentlemen”.
After completing three years of undergraduate, Richards’ professor recommended that he transfer to Harvard University to study for a music degree. When lack of funds ruled that out, Richards stayed on at the Conservatory, for two years of post-graduate study. He built a reputation as an accompanist, working in the studio of a top vocal coach. He also performed throughout New England with a male quartet, the Mansfield Singers.
Richards returned home in 1934, only to find that there were no positions for music teachers. He was offered a position for six months at Berkeley and established the school’s choir. In 1935, he opened a music studio in Hamilton where he taught voice, piano and theory. Richards also taught for a time at Sandys Secondary School.
In 1943, Frederick Furbert, Berkeley’s new headmaster, asked him to assist with the school choir. He did this on a voluntary basis for the next four years. Then in 1947, after the board found funds—at Furbert’s urging—for his salary, he was appointed the school’s first full-time music teacher.
He continued, however, to teach at his studio. Musicians and singers who sought him out for lessons over the years included Georgine Hill, Kingsley Swan Sr. and Jr., Kenneth Dill, Ghandi Burgess and Millard Williams. Jazz pianist Lance Hayward and drummer Tootsie Bean both established successful careers in New York.
In an interview in Music on the Rock, Ghandi Burgess was quoted as saying: “Although Joseph Richards was strictly into the classics, as opposed to popular music, he had a hand in moulding the great players, including Lance who studied with him for ten years!”
Gary Burgess said Richards taught him maths and music at Berkeley and voice and piano at his studio. Burgess also recalled the Sunday soirees he and his wife Louisa hosted for promising students at their Somerset home, where two Steinway grand pianos held pride of place.
For Richards, teaching was truly a labour of love.
He told the Bermuda Recorder in a 1970 interview: “I have had many opportunities to leave Bermuda and make money. I could have stayed in America. But money was not my main objective. In 1938, Roland Hayes wanted me to be his accompanist.
“This was the hardest decision I ever had to make. Accompanying artists was something I dearly loved to do. But I had come home to fulfill a need. The people needed me.
“Mr. Hayes could have had many pianists in the States. I felt it would be selfish of me to leave. I have been called here many times from schools in America asking me to come and teach.”
He also said: “When I opened my studio, I felt that I could do anything. The ironic thing was that many of my students were white. I had accomplished what I had set out to do. It makes no difference what some people do. You have no right to penalize others for it. I’ve taught people from all strata of society. I harbour no bitterness or prejudice against anyone.”
Richards was all too aware that outside of music circles, he was largely unappreciated in Bermuda. His application for a scholarship to study at Harvard was turned down because his field of study was music.
And his salary as a teacher did not reflect his level of education because the New England Conservatory awarded diplomas, not degrees.
“Frankly, musicians were never appreciated in Bermuda,” he told the Bermuda Recorder, “We were only to be used to play at concerts, weddings, funerals and parties. No one considered the years of training, the hours of rehearsals.”
Music was Richards’ life. He was for many years organist and choirmaster at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Somerset and also organist at the US Navy base chapel in Southampton.
Richards married fellow teacher Louisa Gardiner in December 1941. The couple had two children: Joseph, who was born in 1942, and Margaret, who was born in 1944.
Richards was a deeply religious man with a gentle demeanour, who largely remained out of the public arena. The only time he was apparently ever sat for a newspaper interview was in August 1970, the year he retired from Berkeley.
Richards, who continued to teach for many years after his retirement, died on October 29, 1985. Having lived out of the spotlight, there was no newspaper obit of his death.
In 2001, Richards was awarded a posthumous Founders Award by the Bermuda Arts Council. Fittingly, a former student, drummer Clarence “Tootsie” Bean, a professional musician who spent part of his career working overseas, was a recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award the same year. At the awards ceremony, Joseph Richards Jr. said teaching was his father’s “life’s work”.
“He would spend his days teaching at Berkeley, move on to his studio, come home to have supper and then teach some more,” he said. “He always knew that music was his purpose, and not just music but the teaching of it.”
