Bass-baritone Davis Bingham, a native of East Tennessee, has enjoyed a varied career as singer, conductor, university professor, public school teacher and education executive. He is a two-time regional winner of the Metropolitan Opera Auditions and has performed with major opera companies and oratorio societies throughout the South and Southwest. He is the featured soloist on the Columbia Masterworks recording of composer Lou Harrison's "Four Strict Songs for Baritone and Orchestra" with the Louisville Symphony Orchestra on the orchestra's acclaimed Contemporary Composers Series. He was soloist in the 1950s on the weekly nationwide broadcast of The Baptist Hour. Dr. Bingham served for eleven years on the graduate school faculty of Northeast Louisiana State College (now the University of Louisiana-Monroe) where he was director of the concert choir and professor of voice. His choirs there were frequent performers with the New Orleans and Shreveport orchestras and opera companies and on state and regional convention programs of Music Teachers National Association and Music Educators National Conference. He has served as clinician, conductor and adjudicator of local and state public school choral music festivals in Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi, and the Carolinas. His service in the U.S. Army included a tour in the Far East where he was the founder and conductor of the award-winning 8th U.S. Army Choir, service for which he was personally decorated by General Maxwell D. Taylor, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and senior military advisor to President John F. Kennedy. Bingham earned the Ph.D. degree at George Peabody College for Teachers of Vanderbilt University; the master of sacred music degree from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky; and the bachelor of music degree from the Cadek Conservatory of the University of Chattanooga. Dr. Bingham and his wife Joan retired to Hilton Head Island in 1994. Shortly thereafter he founded The Hilton Head Chorale, now The Davis Bingham Chorale. He served for nearly two years as interim director of music at Hilton Head's First Presbyterian Church and performed regularly as cantorial soloist at the island's Congregation Beth Yam. Churches he served in prior years include First Baptist in Chattanooga (six years); First Presbyterian, Monroe, LA (14 years); and Westminster Presbyterian, Rock Hill, SC (18 years). Dr. Bingham was for several years lecturer at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort and performed as soloist with the Hilton Head Orchestra and Chamber Music Hilton Head. Davis and Joan are now living in Chapel Hill, NC, where they have purchased a villa home at The Cedars of Chapel Hill, a continuing care retirement community. |
Biography |
