A Weekly Column for Musicians, Song Leaders, and Worshipers
MONDAY, MAY 18, 2026
Mrs. Morrison’s Heels
You never know who is watching you — or what a child is learning while they sit and stare.
By Robert Wright | Minister of Music, New Light Baptist Church
When I was a boy at New Tabernacle Baptist Church in Monroe, I did not learn gospel music from a book. I learned it from a pair of heels. Mrs. Leatrice Morrison sat at the Hammond organ and pulled a whole service out of three places at once — full chords with both hands, the choir held together by a glance, and underneath all of it, her left foot never stopped moving on the bass pedals. I was a child sitting in a pew behind her, watching that foot in heels.
Many young musicians today have never touched a bass pedal. New-age churches put a bass guitar player in the rhythm section and let the organist play with both hands free. But something is lost when the organist no longer carries the bottom of the sound in their own body. The bass pedal teaches you to feel the song from the ground up.
What I picked up from Mrs. Morrison’s heels, the Lord finished in my left hand at the Louisiana Baptist Youth Encampment under Greg Jones. I was fifteen, and Greg placed me on keyboards with one assignment: play the bass line. Nothing else. For two summers he did not teach me a single chord. Those two years are the reason I can do anything at all.
Mrs. Morrison was not teaching me. She was just playing. She did not know a future organist was tracing her foot on the floor. You never know who is watching you. You never know what young person has a gift waiting for one ordinary Sunday, one steady left foot, to wake it up. Play like somebody is learning. Somebody is.
THIS WEEK’S SONG
“He’s Preparing Me” — Daryl Coley. Coley reminds us that the preparing happens in the seasons nobody is applauding — the years of bass line only, the Sundays sitting on that wooden pew just watching. “For something I cannot handle, He’s preparing me.” Every quiet observation, every disciplined hour, is the Lord shaping a musician for a moment that has not yet arrived. Play this week like the preparing is still going on. It is.
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