George Beverly Shea, a longtime associate of the Rev. Billy Graham, appearing before an estimated 200 million people at Graham revival meetings worldwide, died April 16th, 2013 in Asheville, N.C. He was 104.
Of the hundreds of songs he sang, Mr. Shea was most closely identified with “How Great Thou Art,” a hymn that became the de facto anthem of Mr. Graham’s ministry. In 1957, at a crusade in New York City, Mr. Shea, by popular demand, sang it on 108 consecutive nights.
Other songs for which he was known include “I’d Rather Have Jesus,” for which he composed the music, and “The Wonder of It All,” for which he wrote words and music. He recorded more than 70 albums.
George Beverly Shea, known as Bev, was born on Feb. 1, 1909, in Winchester, Ontario. His father, the Rev. Adam J. Shea, was a Wesleyan Methodist minister; his mother, the former Maude Whitney, was the organist in her husband’s church.
Growing up, Bev dreamed the dream of every red-blooded Canadian boy — to be a Mountie — but he also studied piano, organ and violin. One of eight children, he did his first formal singing in his father’s church choir and his first informal singing long before, around the family table.
As a young man Mr. Shea attended Houghton College in Houghton, N.Y., but left before graduating to help support his family in the Depression. He found work in Manhattan as a clerk with the Mutual Life Insurance Company, a post he would hold for nearly a decade. Meanwhile he studied voice with private teachers.
During this period Mr. Shea entered an amateur talent contest on Fred Allen’s radio show, singing “Go Down, Moses.” He came in second — he was beaten by a yodeler — but the exposure led to offers to sing on commercial radio. He declined, ill at ease with the idea of a life in secular music. His career in sacred music, however, was now assured.
In the late 1930s Mr. Shea moved to Chicago to join WMBI, the radio station of the Moody Bible Institute, as a staff announcer and singer. One day in 1943 a young man knocked on the studio door. The visitor was a Wheaton College student named William Franklin Graham Jr., who had stopped by to tell Mr. Shea how much he loved his singing.
Before long Mr. Graham, who had become a preacher in Western Springs, Ill., had recruited Mr. Shea to sing on his own religious radio show, “Songs in the Night.” From the mid-1940s to the early ’50s, Mr. Shea was also the host of “Club Time,” a gospel show broadcast on ABC Radio.
In 1947 Mr. Shea joined Mr. Graham and Cliff Barrows, who would serve as Mr. Graham’s longtime music director, in the first Billy Graham Crusade, in Charlotte.
Mr. Shea was the author of several books, including the memoir “How Sweet the Sound” (2004), written with Betty Free Swanberg and Jeffery McKenzie.
Mr. Shea’s first wife, the former Erma Scharfe, whom he married in 1934, died in 1976. His survivors include his second wife, the former Karlene Aceto, whom he married in 1985, and two children from his first marriage, Ronald and Elaine. Information on other survivors was not immediately available.
Though Mr. Shea was long a vital part of Mr. Graham’s work — Mr. Graham routinely insisted that without him he would have had no ministry — he retained a wry modesty about his role. “The people didn’t come to hear me,” Mr. Shea told The Charlotte Observer in 2009. “They came to hear Billy. To get to hear him, they first had to listen to me.”
It was not always so. When they joined forces in the 1940s, Mr. Shea was already a nationally known voice in Christian music, Mr. Graham a fledgling minister. Their early revival meetings were often advertised this way: BEV SHEA SINGS Billy Graham will preach.
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