Past, present and future all come together at a historic school in Orange County that has seen a great deal of history in its 87 years (and not just as a school). Murphey School was a first- through 12th-grade school from 1923 until 1959, with an auditorium added in 1936 that was a key live-music venue in its day. After falling into disrepair, the complex has been restored and is now home to a nonprofit retreat center called Shared Visions.
Saturday night will bring an attempt to echo the past with the Murphey School Radio Show, an old-fashioned variety show featuring local literary and musical lights including Daniel Wallace, Jill McCorkle, Lise Uyanik and Bland Simpson. It's just the sort of entertainment that used to go on all the time in the Murphey School Auditorium, a WPA project building that hosted many country music legends.
"I've heard from two or three individuals who said they were at the show that Bill Monroe played there," says Shared Visions founder Jay Miller. "Also Ernest Tubb, Roy Acuff, Hank Snow. It's got quite a history."
Before founding Shared Visions, Miller spent 22 years as proprietor of the six-store instrument chain Music Loft. He sold that in early 2002, at which point he had offers to stay in the music business. He says he could have chosen to retire, thanks to some smart real-estate investments.
Instead, Miller decided to go into philanthropy. He completed Duke University's nonprofit management program, bought the Murphey School and set about restoring it. To date he has spent more than $1 million of his own money on the project.
The complex is now home to various agencies dealing with mental health and substance abuse in Durham and Orange counties, and Miller comes by his interest in that honestly. He had some substance-abuse issues of his own in the early 1980s.
"I'm not embarrassed about it," Miller says. "Well, maybe a tiny bit. There's so much stigma around mental-health issues, so I try to be open - especially since it was a long time ago, I've had some success and I'm not running for office. But who hasn't had some experience with mental illness, either themselves or their family?"
Who was Murphey?
It is fitting that Miller has done so much work on behalf of a facility bearing the name Murphey. Archibald DeBow Murphey died in 1832, but he still casts a long shadow across North Carolina. There are several schools across the state bearing his name (including what is now Burning Coal Theatre Company's venue in Raleigh), and he is still regarded as the father of public education in North Carolina.
"There's a hall named after him on campus here, too," says Simpson, who is a UNC-Chapel Hill professor in addition to keyboardist for the Red Clay Ramblers. "Murphey was a visionary state leader, very big in the early 1800s on public education and public improvements. Way before anybody had ever heard the word 'infrastructure,' he was talking about the need for roads and canals - and schools. So he was a forward-thinker. Ironically, however, he died penniless."
Raising money
Miller hopes to avoid a similar fate, so that he can continue his work at the Murphey School. Saturday's show will be a fundraiser for the mental health agencies headquartered there, with musical and spoken-word performances. It will be recorded for radio broadcast later.
"We hope to create the feel of an event that would have happened in that auditorium in the 1930s," says Donna Campbell, the event's producer/director. "The school auditorium was the place for Saturday night shows. We just got a call from a woman in her 80s, in fact, who'd gone to school there and wants to come back for the program. We'll even be doing the 'Murphey School Song.'"
The "Murphey School Song"?
"Yep," Campbell says with a laugh. "It's really corny. 'We will fight every foe,' that kind of thing. I called up Bob Lee, who is 85 and went to school there for his whole education, and told him I'd heard he was the one who could sing that song. 'Oh yeah,' he said. So he sang it over the phone, I recorded it and sent it to Stella, a cappella. And they're going to sing it."
