Biography

Keeping the Faith

Kyser’s most noted post-retirement work was for the Christian Science Church. His first experience with the religion was as a child, when his mother was healed from her deathbed by a Christian Science practitioner, Georgia said. "Kay remembered this experience from when he was a child, and he turned to the church later in life," she said.

He told the Greensboro Daily News in 1981, he began to seek spiritual guidance in 1932. "I needed straightening out," he said. "My granddaddy had been a Baptist minister, and my uncles were surgeons and my brothers were lawyers and judges, and here I was leading a dirty old jazz band and making more money than all of them together. I had such a guilt complex."

PulloutSo, Kyser recalled, he went to see a Christian Science practitioner, "had some prayers for myself and got straightened out." The practitioner told Kyser that few people could entertain the masses, and that doing so would help them relieve the tension in their lives. Kyser believed that the practitioner’s advice helped him make better music.

"I felt so healed that I quit worrying about it and for the next 18 years I couldn’t think of anything except how to make better records and how to make the music more danceable. And I guess we did more than any bandleader in that time," he remembered. "Underlying that was the unquenchable desire to serve mankind’s needs."

According to Georgia, Kyser turned to the church in earnest in the late 1940s, partly because of his own health problems. "He had so much energy, jumping around all the time, and put so much of himself into everything that his feet started giving him problems," she said. "It got so bad I had to push him around in a wheelchair."

He took a more active role in the church after his retirement. He first became a Christian Science practitioner, engaging full-time in the church’s healing ministry. In 1974 he went to Boston to work in the Christian Science Church headquarters and directed the church’s radio and television broadcasting division.

In 1979, Kyser took to the road again – this time in the name of God. That year, he became a Christian Science lecturer, touring the country and abroad spreading the message of the Christian Scientists. In 1983, he was given the honorary position of president of the nation’s Christian Science Church. He remained active in the church until 1985, when he died at age 80 of heart failure. Kyser was laid to rest on the campus he loved, in the old Chapel Hill cemetery. His memorial service was held in Gerrard Hall, where he put together his first band.

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