By CAROLYN BROWN
Staff Writer
Chris Haynes, longtime accordionist for the Young@Heart Chorus and associate professor emeritus of music at Springfield College, died on Wednesday, March 12.
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Chris Haynes during the Young@Heart Chorus show “Old School” at the Academy of Music in late 2024. “I can’t remember a single day when I did not see him doing what he loved,” said Haynes’ daughter, Norma Jean Haynes.
“Chris was somebody who really cared about people, really made sure they were doing okay,” said Bob Cilman, co-director of Young@Heart Chorus. “He would help them with bags. He was just a kind guy, and he understood who needed more help and helped whenever he could. It’s kind of a cliché to say that Young@Heart is family, but in a lot of ways, it is, and Chris was such an important part of the family.”
“I can’t remember a single day when I did not see him doing what he loved,” said Haynes’ daughter, Norma Jean Haynes, who is also a musician. “He made his whole life about the things he was passionate about.”
Haynes ran the music program at Springfield College, where he worked from 1996 to 2019. One of the classes he taught there was “Music as a Form of Social Protest.” In a 2018 profile in the college’s student newspaper, Haynes was quoted as saying, “Music, and all arts, should be in large part about social justice. It’s just what music seems to be about. If it’s just about sex and drugs, then who cares?” While not strictly an activist himself, Norma Jean said, Haynes played benefit shows for various causes, and he believed strongly in “community care and upholding the different creative institutions that keep our community vibrant.”
One of the highlights of his teaching career came in 1998, when he and his students were invited to perform with Kenny Rogers at the MassMutual Center for a crowd of 6,000.
“At first I was shocked and asked if we were really the choir they wanted,” Haynes told the Triangle, Springfield College’s magazine. “But they assured me we were exactly who they wanted.”
When Haynes retired, he was invited to speak at the Springfield College’s baccalaureate ceremony in May 2019, where he told the new graduates the story of how he got into the accordion – he met a man from Texas who was selling them from his pickup truck at the Brimfield Antique Flea Market – and how it led him to Young@Heart and to his role at the college.
“It’s been an amazing experience,” he said. “What you think of as maybe being an accident, sometimes will turn into one of the most profound things that may ever happen to you.”
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Chris Haynes performing in a farewell concert in honor of his retirement, March 29, 2019. Haynes ran the music program at Springfield College, where he worked from 1996 to 2019. He was also a longtime member of the Young@Heart Chorus, and worked as a pianist and accordionist in a many local bands.
Martin Shell, a theater professor at Springfield College and longtime colleague of Haynes, wrote in a faculty email thread shared with the Gazette that Haynes “inspired and supported more creative efforts of students and of other faculty than can be counted, everything from accompaniment for dancers to improvising live musical underscoring for full length plays and composing original music for special events. And with profound sensitivity to their potentials and his unfailing taste, he guided and directed hundreds of student musicians over the years to exceed their own expectations of themselves.”
“His talents, expressiveness, and creativity as a musician were beyond remarkable, completely astounding and very moving, and he generously shared his gifts and expressive power at every opportunity. It seemed he could play any instrument with virtuosity, especially keyboards and accordions, and in every imaginable idiom and style,” Shell wrote.
Cilman noted that playing the accordion for a group of singing senior citizens would seem, on its face, like “probably the most incongruous thing you can imagine, but on another level, it worked so well because it had this interesting old-timey feel and it seemed to fit with who the chorus was.” Haynes’ accordion-playing, he said, was “really kind of central to the music we did.”
“He was playing everything from the Rolling Stones to Coldplay on the accordion, and it never sounded out of place,” said Norma Jean.
Interestingly, Haynes’ first gig with Young@Heart was on the piano, not the accordion. The group had a gig in Rhinebeck, New York, and their regular pianist couldn’t make it. Haynes was able to sub in last-minute, and he made a good impression on Cilman: “He was so fun at improvising, and it just worked so well.”
“I knew that I didn’t want two pianos in the group,” Cilman said, “but I knew that I wanted Chris to be playing with us somehow.”
Haynes traveled the world with Young@Heart. One evening in 2003, the group was slated to perform at a concert in Honolulu, Hawaii. A few hours before the show, while on the bus, Haynes was struck by a sudden gallstone attack, for which he was taken to a hospital. Somehow, Haynes was able to convince the hospital staff that he was well enough to leave to go play in the show.
And he did – and the concert went great.
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Chris Haynes, who died earlier this month, photographed during a Young@Heart show at the Academy of Music in late 2023.
“We all toasted him afterwards,” said Cilman. “It was one of those amazing things where you get used to the idea that you’ve got to fill in around him, and all of a sudden we didn’t have to do that. It was a great relief.”
Haynes also played with other groups and musicians, including Norma Dream (his daughter’s band), The Threesies, Wilde Irish Women, Big Yellow Taxi, The O-Tones, The Mistress Miriam Show, Claudia Schmidt, and the Johnny Memphis Band, where “he added just the right feel and touch to Celtic songs like ‘Old New York Hotel’ or Brazilian inflected songs like ‘Some Other Boyfriend,’” Memphis said in an email.
“He always added to the overall song, never drawing attention to his contribution,” Memphis said. “He knew how to make music fit together.”
Drummer J.J. O’Connell, Haynes’ bandmate in Young@Heart and The Threesies, said, “Just playing with him, he was a pro and you listened to what he had to say because he really knew what he was talking about.”
“The accordion is not a quiet instrument,” O’Connell added, “but he could play with a lot of taste and subtlety and nuance.”
Haynes was also an accompanist (on both piano and accordion) and part of the faculty at the Northampton Community Music Center for a few years as well. Executive Director Jason Trotta said, “Everybody loved him here, and he had extraordinary talent.”
“He, as a person, was so gracious and special and generous and so giving in how he approached everything, and [he] had such a huge heart and a poetic way about him,” Trotta said.
As a full-time musician, Norma Jean said, “You have to be very creative about how you live your life and work very hard, but then he didn’t really make it seem like he was working very hard. He proceeded with a lot of joy. He loved his life.”
One of his passions other than music was cooking, especially smoked meats. Once, Haynes asked O’Connell to play on his album “Christopher Haynes: In 3,” but he couldn’t pay, so he offered to compensate O’Connell with smoked meat instead. O’Connell told him, “I would do it for free, but the smoked meat is a bonus, so absolutely.”
The day after Haynes passed, Young@Heart made a social media post remembering him and his impact, including his sense of humor – namely, a love of accordion jokes (“The definition of a gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn’t.”)
“He will be missed in every song we play from now on,” the post said. “His notes will linger forever.”
Haynes is survived by his children, Norma Jean, Rosemary and Sam, and his ex-wife, Anne.
Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.
