Sound of Music in the COVID-19 Era with the Arthurs

by Charles McGuigan 05.2020

Turns out Richmond has its own Trapp Family Singers, only they’re better than the Austrian transplants of Sound of Music fame.

They’re the Arthurs—Charles “King”, Sara, Josie and Loudon—and live in Bellevue on Richmond’s Northside.

On COVID-19 Palm Sunday, while Christians worldwide wove palm fronds into crosses, the air was warm and the sky clear, and the streets still. Cars, coated with a yellow haze of pollen that had accumulated for weeks, hugged curbs, motionless and silent. The only sound was a sort of dawn chorus (though it was it almost noon) of jays and robins, cardinals and Carolina wrens, and other species I could not identify.

Rounding the corner at Newport, I could see the Arthurs on their front porch, and they were good enough to allow a socially distanced interview, and then a gift for all to hear.

I’ve known the Arthurs for years now, some of my favorite people on our beleaguered planet. Charles has let me use many of his original compositions to build sound beds for audio stories. Easily the most versatile musician I’ve ever met, he can play any instrument he picks up, even a washboard.  I suspect he could coax music out of a cucumber. What’s more, he is an extraordinary songwriter and an excellent performer.

Sara Murphy Arthur has a voice somewhere south of Norah Jones, and a little north of Patsy Cline.  For years, she and her husband, along with Johnny Hott and a number of other musicians, had a band called Piedmont Souprize that played every Sunday night at Café Diem in the Devil’s Triangle. Some of the best music you were likely to hear in Richmond at the time. And it was up close and personal, and Sara’s voice would melt you away.

When Charles was just eight years old, he performed his first impromptu gig at a wedding reception. The band had just finished their set, and Charles mounted the empty stage, picked up the drumsticks and began banging away. A small crowd gathered and someone said, “That kid ought to have a drum set.”

As he entered his teens, Charles realized he could tap out melodies on the piano. He would also sneak into his older brother’s room and play his guitar, plucking out tunes.

And then, on his sixteenth birthday, Charles received his first electric guitar, and he’s been hard at it ever since. In those early years, he emulated Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Joe Walsh. “The whole classical rock thing,” Charles told me years ago. “And then I got into the blues.

While attending college at Virginia Tech, Charles honed his skills on the guitar and dug deeper into the tangle of American roots music. Stevie Ray Vaughan, who was big at the time, led him to B.B. King, Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters—blues royalty.

“They opened up whole windows to me,” Charles recalled. “I went from blues to rockabilly and other things.”  And then he began exploring other branches of the tree of American music. He studied Chuck Berry, Chet Atkins, Les Paul, Scotty Moore, Merle Travis—and virtually every great side man who had performed on the Nashville pop records of the fifties and sixties, and the soul records out of Motown. “All these quintessential American guitar players,” he told me. “I was discovering American music.”

He played a couple of gigs in college, and after graduation took all of his classic rock music to the record store and traded them in for older recordings of blues, rockabilly, country and jazz—real American music.

After college, Charles joined the U.S. Air Force, became a navigator, and was stationed at Pease Air Force Base, a Strategic Air Command facility in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  During his time in Portsmouth, which had a very active music scene, Charles began studying music in earnest.  “I’d go fly for ten days and then I had five days off, and I had nothing to do so I sat and studied recordings,” Charles told me. “That’s when I really, really studied.”

After his military service, having achieved the rank of captain, Charles decided to get his teaching certificate at James Madison University. While at JMU, he would frequent a bohemian dive in Harrisonburg called the Little Grill. It’s where actors and local artists and hipsters-in-training hung out. There was a velvet painting of Bob Dylan on one wall, an old upright piano in the corner, a guitar propped against the makeshift stage. At an open mike night one Sunday, a young woman was urged by friends to get up on the stage and sing. She finally relented, and told the audience she was going to sing a number by Patsy Cline and was going to do it solo and a cappella because she had no one to accompany her.

A hand shot up in the audience and someone shouted.  It was Charles Arthur. “Hey, I know all the songs,” he said, pointing toward the guitar that rested against the stage. “I can play that guitar if you want.”

The young woman on stage was hesitant. They’d never rehearsed before, but she said, “Okay.” And before she knew it, Charles was on the stage with guitar in hand, standing directly behind her.

“What song are you going to do?” he asked.

“Crazy,” said the young woman.

“Well, what key?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Sing a little bit,” Charles suggested. She opened her mouth, and it was as if Patsy Cline had reincarnated.

It was in B-flat. She sang; he played. The audience was dead quiet, enraptured. There was a real kind of magic there, and at the end of the song, the audience roared approval.

 “That was the night I met Charles,” Sara told me years ago. “We exchanged names, but not phone numbers. I thanked him for accompanying me.”

When Sara first went off to college at JMU she studied music. “I did a semester of music and realized what I wanted to do with music I was not going to get from the music department,” she said. “It was a very classical-driven program, voice lessons, learning how to sing arias, operatic things.”

She changed her major to human communications with a minor in English, but she continued honing her own vocal skills.

After their initial meeting, Sara and Charles learned that they lived a few short blocks from one another on South Mason Street. They met up a few times, talking mainly about music, but that’s about it. Sara left for the summer to do an internship in Richmond and returned the following fall.

In the fall, when Sara returned to Harrisonburg, she and Charles began spending more time together. And then the sparks of romance began to fly, and the relationship flamed. After they finished school in Harrisonburg, Charles and Sara moved to Richmond.

That was in 1993, and a year later the two were married.

From their union came forth two children, a girl and a boy. And considering the genes that intertwined to create them, both Josie and Loudon are liberally endowed with musical talent, and they both share the physical attributes of a beautiful mother and a handsome father.

“I don’t think I was very good at singing when I was really little,” Josie said from the porch steps. “But I always liked to sing, and I always thought I was a good singer. Then I started doing theatre and I would sing in theatre and everyone was like, ‘Wow she’s really good for a ten year old.’ I took vocal lessons after that.”

Even in elementary school, Josie did her fair share of theatre. But in middle school that all ended—they didn’t offer theatre. So, Josie turned to SPARC (School of the Performing Arts in the Richmond Community). “I was kind of reluctant to do it in the beginning,” she said. “But then I did it, and it was a lot of fun and it ended up opening a lot of doors for me.”

Josie attended Appomattox Regional Governor's School, which is well-known for its arts programs. “They kept me busy,” she said. “At Appomattox, there was a lot of creative and artistic opportunity there, and I learned a lot and got a lot of experience.”

Now with college looming in the fall, Josie is considering either the Boston Conservatory, or Emerson, which is also in Boston. “I’m interested in studying acting and theatre,” she said. “The benefit of going to school in Boston is I could take songwriting classes in the school of music.”

Like her daughter, Sara seemed born to sing.  “I started pretty young,” she said. “I just went through school liking to sing. I was in any choir I could be in, and then in high school, where there were no musical productions, I begged the drama teacher there to do one, and she did.”

Charles nodded and smiled. He thought back on his own introduction to a life of music. He remembered hanging out in a music store and a guitar shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire when he was stationed at Pease Air Force Base.  “I got to meet real musicians and they’d go play gigs and sometimes I’d sit in with them,” he said.

“Some people are just really quick to learn things,” said Charles. “I certainly had a knack for music, but I wouldn’t say it all came easily. It was natural for me to love it, but I’ve worked at it my whole life. I’ve been playing for forty years, and clawing my way through it.”

Now, his son, the youngest member of their clan, is edging his way toward music.

“Loudon has a really beautiful voice,” said Sara. “And he’s learning how to play piano. So he’ll be part of this Trapp family.”

Loudon also plays percussion. “And I love science,” he told me. “And this not-going-to-school thing because of this COVID-19 is making me kind of sad.  But I’m learning a lot these days. I’m also getting into the Harry Potter movies. I really like the ones where he’s talking to snakes. But I don’t like his stupid family.”

“Muggles be damned,” I said and then asked the Arthurs if they’d perform a song, and since Bill Withers had just passed away, they sang one of the most moving renditions of “Lean on Me” I’ve ever heard (you can listen to it here on our website under COVID-19 remotes). 

When they finished singing, a round of applause erupted from the front porches of the American Four Squares lining the street. It was the perfect antidote for these surreal times—a sovereign remedy, a medicine for melancholy.

“You guys are amazing,” I told them. “You don’t know what joy you bring. I think you underestimate it.”

“It’s interesting to think what songs will come out of this period of time,” Sarah said. “The loneliness and the isolation and the longing and everything that everybody’s feeling at the same time. So it’s going to be an interesting artistic swell, I think.”

Sara Murray Arthur’s eyes then roamed slowly around the porch, taking in each member of her family. “I’m trying to find as many bright spots or silver linings in this as possible,” she said. “We probably wouldn’t have taken the time to do what we’ve just done. Because, honestly, everybody was so busy with their lives. Sitting down and singing songs together. The fact that we’ve done it a few times now is just so precious to me, and it will be something that we’ll always remember and think about. I feel fortunate for little stuff like that. Sometimes you can make lemonade.”