By Lidia Wasowicz
The halls of St. Sebastian Church in Greenbrae are alive with the sound of music thanks to Eric Maddox, maverick choir director who got the job 40 years ago in response to one of 100 resumes he sent out upon arriving in San Francisco.
Over the decades, the prodigy from Detroit — described by some as a softie, by some as a prankster and by all as a man with a heart of gold and a talent rarer than platinum — took his singers in new directions and to new locations.
From expanding the repertoire across an array of genres to traveling to France with his troupe as guests of a famed boys choral group, the master musician has left an indelible mark in and out of church.
Equally adept at performing and directing, the self-described “pianist who plays the organ” initiated music programs in schools, introduced troubled youth to instrumentation, shared the stage with thespians, conducted elite conservatory students and provided custom-made accompaniment at birthday parties and other special events.
At 73, he continues to teach privately and entertain at an offshoot of the exclusive, all-male Bohemian Club called The Family, in addition to transforming the worship of God into a symphony of prayer and praise each Sunday.
“The liturgy is the word of God, and music is the voice of God,” said Maddox, an Episcopalian who attends Grace Cathedral in San Francisco but recognizes the pontiff, having fallen in “love” with the late Pope Francis, and reveres the Blessed Mother, always parking his car by her statue outside St. Sebastian’s side entrance. “Music raises your level of involvement, heightens the spirit and is the way I communicate with God.”
Likewise, it provides an “integral aspect” of every Mass and devotion for retired professor and attorney Francisco Wong-Diaz, who met the maestro as a lector at St. Sebastian’s, which he attended from 1973 to 2002, when he moved to Menlo Park.
He remembers Maddox as a “pillar of our parish community,” remarkable for his “development, training and successful organization of our choir.”
Encouraged by an enthusiastic contingent of three dozen or so and an ample repertoire developed under his predecessors, Maddox started shuffling smaller voices into larger roles, rotating the cantor and making other modifications to “strengthen the choir (and) do beautiful liturgies.”
Parish council member and former cantor and children’s choir director Celeste Chapman lauded him for venturing beyond classical and into contemporary, gospel, chant and other styles, “exposing people to compositions and composers who are significant throughout history and in our own time.”
The longest-serving choir member, Donna Boyd, exposed to opera, concerts and dance since early childhood, considers Maddox’s contributions indispensable.
“I grew up with music all around me and can’t imagine not having it in church,” said Boyd, who joined the choir in 1980 and befriended Maddox at his debut five years later when her mother invited the lifelong bachelor to dinner.
“Right away we loved his music, and Mother, a great hostess, asked him and all the choir members to our house,” Boyd reminisced.
The familial friendship flourished, with Maddox visiting often, sharing common interests, playing her mother’s favorite tunes at her 85th birthday bash and, 12 years later, at her funeral.
Described as approachable, accomplished, amenable, charming, cheerful and charitable, Maddox heard a chorus of instant approval from the vocalists he was coaching.
Among them, Janet McGarry, now 95 and retired from the troupe after 25 years, recalled wistfully how “everybody loved the choir, and we had many performances, and it was always a big deal.”
On the heels of a round of musical chairs filled by three directors, none of whom lasted more than a year, Maddox’s entrance came “at the right time, when we needed him,” Boyd recalled.
“When he showed up, everything blossomed: he increased our repertoire, put on shows, went to retirement communities, even put on nightclub and talent shows for the parishioners,” she added.
The award-winning musician devoted many extra hours to planning and preparing for each production.
Offering gospel, classical, 20th-century and 21st-century selections, Maddox “is so gifted, he can play virtually any kind of music, and do it well,” said Chapman, who had filled in until the new director made his appearance.
“Eric’s musical experience is broad, and he’s constantly working on new programs,” Boyd said. “He doesn’t care if someone fails or forgets, never says anything unkind. He loves the musician in all of us.”
Such admirable standards have earned him high marks with the pastor and staff as well.
“I think very highly of Eric,” said Father Bill Thornton. “He is a world-class musician.”
“He radiates joy through his music, either on the piano or the organ,” added parish manager Marianne Kambur. “He is such an integral part of the lives of the parishioners of St. Sebastian’s.”
He cultivated that relationship from the start with such special treats as the 1985 and 1987 visits of the internationally acclaimed Les Petits Chanteurs (little singers) of Aix-en-Provence, France.
“I had just arrived and thought it would be a great idea to have them stay with our families and give concerts with a sacred portion and a popular portion,” Maddox recalled. “They appeared in their 16th-century robes, gave a marvelous rendition of religious music and then, in the second half, they learned ‘America the Beautiful’ for us.”
The renowned choir of boys ages 9 to 15, established in 1907 in Paris, wowed the parishioners as performers and won them over completely as houseguests.
Boyd kept in touch with the two boys who stayed with her, then ages 12 and 14, until they wed.
“When the two boys we had in our house first came, they spoke very little English, but by the time they left some days later, they spoke plenty!” said McGarry in recalling the field trips, swim parties and ball games arranged for the visitors.
“We enjoyed it so much that a couple of years later, we decided to go to Provence to see them,” she added, noting that the 1988 excursion was her first trip to France.
Maddox, who had honed his keyboard skills in Paris, served as tour guide around the countryside between group sing-alongs, lunches and dinners with the boys and their families.
Maddox’s influence and impact have similarly touched the largely artistic membership of The Family — formed in 1901 by newspapermen protesting the Bohemian’s Club’s censorship — which engaged him at the same time and in similar fashion as St. Sebastian’s.
“Of all the very competent musicians we have, Eric is considered as one of the best pianists, and of all our members, he’s the most beloved,” said Richard Johns, noting that the club boasts both its own symphony orchestra and chorus.
Since landing the gig 40 years ago, in response to one of the 100 letters he had mailed, Maddox has played parts at the keyboard and on the stage in hundreds of the 50 often elaborate performances the San Francisco social club produces annually at its scenic redwood retreat in Portola Valley.
Among the standouts: the night The Family’s Songbirds chorus, which he headed for a decade, outperformed the rival Bohemian Club at a festival hosted by the bigger, older group; the day he received the coveted Ring of Appreciation for outstanding contributions; the evening he took on the role of Snow White before a crowd of 200.
“He was absolutely hilarious,” Johns said. “It was a huge hit, and he loved it.”
To help make troubled youth a success, Maddox would take a bus from his home in San Francisco, transfer in Marin, then walk a mile along the highway to reach the St. Vincent’s School for Boys property in San Rafael, recalled Boyd, a former volunteer with the Godmothers, who raise funds in support of the struggling youngsters.
The Timothy Murphy School — named after the Irish pioneer who on his deathbed in 1853 bequeathed 314 acres that developed into the St. Vincent’s campus — closed in 2019 when its lease expired.
Offered a position with the San Francisco Conservatory, Maddox had left the previous year after devoting five years to the students, many of whom lived at St. Vincent’s, a residential treatment home for “traumatized” boys ages 7 to 18.
“Often coming from abusive, broken, drug-addicted families, those boys loved Eric and the stability and discipline he provided,” Boyd said. “And he loved introducing them to piano and string instruments, taking them to rest homes to perform and seeing them blossom.”
Maddox’s own blossoms began to bud at his birth in Detroit as the first of seven children of parents with big hearts and dreams.
“I had a delightful childhood,” Maddox said. “The most important thing was that every morning Mom came into the room with a smile so we’d all smile.”
Thelma Maddox’s eternal optimism belied the adversity she had faced growing up in the South in the 1920s and 1930s.
“We didn’t learn about the racism my mother experienced until we were adults when our father told us,” said Winnie Maddox, the oldest of four sisters. “I have no idea how she could have been so positive with everything she experienced as a child.”
Always helping others, never gossiping, advocating in school, working at the polls and caring for ailing neighbors, her mother, who died at age 67, “was not just a housewife,” Maddox said. “I think she knew she was blessed with a good husband and family.”
Introduced to her future groom by her sister when she was 14, Thelma married Joe Maddox, a World War II veteran who loved jazz and appreciated classical music, in Detroit when they both turned 21 in 1946. Five years later, the couple welcomed Eric into their world of church and community.
The family worshipped at the Saunders Memorial AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church, where Eric, at age 12, began directing the girls choir of some 15 teenagers — and attracting boys to the piano, to their parents’ delight. He remained there until his graduation from Cass Tech High School, at the time Detroit’s only magnet school, designed to attract diversity.
As brothers and sisters came along, the Maddoxes hosted neighborhood Memorial Day parties and invited area youngsters to pick apples and cherries off their trees.
Active and aware, Thelma brought Rosa Parks — long before the civil rights icon’s international celebrity — to Pingree Elementary School, attended by all her children.
The Maddoxes also made sports and music a priority, with every sibling playing an instrument and, for a while, traveling as a family band. (Brother Paul continues as a noted jazz drummer and percussionist, touring the world under the stage name Pheeroan akLaff.)
“Eric’s had quite a life, starting to play piano at 4 and taking private lessons at 9,” said Winnie Maddox, who resided in the San Francisco Bay Area for 27 years before moving to Atlanta. “He was always very respected, liked and talented.”
Well versed in Motown, jazz and dance, he also excelled in track and swimming, shocking Winnie with a dive off a high cliff at the legendary Pools of Oheo during a family vacation to Hawaii in the 1990s.
“As a brother, Eric was always fun, kind and a prankster at times,” she said.
One hot, humid summer night, for example, when she was about 10 and he nearly 16, he advised her to smother her arms and legs in Vaseline to fend off hungry mosquitoes. When she complied, her mother was the only one not to laugh out loud.
On a more serious occasion, his father, a materials supervisor for Chrysler Corp. for 30 years who died in 2018 at age 93, took him to work.
“‘This is the only time you will come to a factory; we want something better for you,’ he told me,” Maddox recalled. “He knew what high school I should go to and talked about the University of Michigan, having no idea I’d go there!”
Maddox left for Ann Arbor with a music scholarship that helped carry him through a piano performance major and French minor. As a bonus, he got his first taste of Europe, touring 13 countries with the glee club.
A mentor, impressed with his skills, arranged for him to refine them in Paris.
Upon matriculating, he followed a buddy to Southern California, where he played the organ at a Catholic church, taught grades 1 through 8 at a school run by the Sisters of Mercy and introduced a variety of music programs to both venues.
Three years later, he found his heart, hearth and home in San Francisco.
“Eric has been here for 40 years to watch families grow, to share the happiness of the sacraments and the sorrow of funerals through the beautiful music he plays,” said St. Sebastian’s Kambur. “He is truly a treasure for our parish.”
For Maddox, the treasure is music, the universal unifier.
“If we have a way to learn to listen to one another as we do to a beautiful composition, we’ll be kinder and better to each other,” he said. “That’s why I have to be there to provide it.”
Award-winning journalist Wasowicz, former West Coast science editor and senior science writer for United Press International, has been writing for Catholic San Francisco since 2011.
