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Thank you for the music

Kalasuri Lylie Godridge suffered a stroke on October 16,1998 and died six days later on October 22. He was 70.

John Lylie Godridge was born on March 4, 1928 in a poor home in Kotahena. His father was a musician, his mother's nee name was Grace Hopwood. He became noticed in his boyhood because of a naturally gifted singing voice.

It brought him free education, including books and clothes, at the Cathedral School Kotahena, in exchange for an obligation to sing at all the services of the Cathedral church in Kotahena under its then Vicar, the Rev. Dudley.

His voice was so good that the Governor of Ceylon, Sir Andrew Caldecott, listening to a rehearsal of the wedding service for his daughter, requested that the boy Lylie should sing a solo followed by the choir in Walford Davies' "God be in my head." This was the start of his rise to fame in this country. From boy soprano he went on to become a young man with a wide voice range from tenor to baritone and bass, always with a fine quality.

The leading voice teacher of the day, Ms. R A Spencer Sheppard, took him under her wing by giving him singing lessons and opportunities for public performance. Godridge went on to become a leading singer on the public stage and on radio.

In 1951 he was a soloist in Bach's St. Mathew Passion sung by the Colombo Philharmonic Choir under the leadership of Gerald Cooray. Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten took part in this performance, and on Lylie's programme sheet they autographed "Many congratulations".

President Jayewardene gave him a round-the-world tour in 1981 as a Sri Lankan Singing Ambassador. He was honoured by the nation with the title of Kalasuri in 1993.

Lylie Godridge had natural leadership. He knew this about himself from his childhood –he was the natural gentle leader in all kinds of school activities such as games, scouting and campfire cooking.

Leadership was combined with qualities of the charismatic kind. He had that kind of stage personality.

And off-stage, he drew disciples into his musical field. (I was one of them. From the early 1960s I felt drawn to be a piano accompanist to him and his flock.) It was a personal magnetism which he had "a kindness, a committedness to music."

Apart from the quality of his voice, he had a stage presence with a pleasant cheerful face. He could get a whole audience to sing with him, and this was best seen in the songs called 'rounds' in which the audience was divided into several sections, each section singing a different part of the song in turn, sometimes with funny actions prescribed by song. He was a man who was asked, he did not have, or wish, to ask.

Lylie Godridge was constant in his devotion to Christianity.

He was an unfailing church-goer and support to the Anglican (Church of Ceylon) community. But it went much deeper than church-going.

It made him get away from the jobs that he had been doing in various commercial firms, feeling that he was not in tune with profit-making.

In 1978 he moved to the YMCA as Music Director. He set up a YMCA 42-voice male voice choir in 1958. It was out of this group that there arose an LG Singers' Quartet in 1962 and the LG Singers. His YMCA work led to the choral work for which he is well-known.

Lylie Godridge believed that his talent for singing was God-given grace, in return for which he used it to the glory of God- singing in churches, training individual singers and choirs, always as an act of charity, free of charge.

When it became known that he was seriously ill with renal failure and needed money for the expensive treatment that was inevitably necessary, there was a spontaneous response from his friends, all of whom had been admirers of his voice and the way he used it for charity, and a fund was set up.

Numerous letters and notes appeared in the newspapers bearing testimony to his charity.

Choral work was one of Lylie Godridge's main lines of musical activity. His own group, the LG Singers, a 16-voice unaccompanied choir, was formed on May 15, 1962, to sing for charity.

He was asked to form the Moratuwa Choral Society. He was conductor of the Colombo Philharmonic Choir. He spent a vast amount of time going from school to school to train their choirs. He held concerts given by massed choirs made up mainly from these school choirs.

It began with a 500-voice massed youth choir in 1979. The children themselves asked him to expand it, and so it subsequently became an annual event with 1,000 voices at the Sugathadasa Stadium.

This year it was 1,600 voices and Lylie felt obliged to conduct the choir, which he did on June 25 seated on a chair as he was already too ill to do so standing up.-VB

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