Salli Terri, 72; Singer, Soloist With Chorale

Salli Terri, popular Southern California singer and recording artist who was a soloist with the Roger Wagner Chorale, has died. She was 72.

Terri died May 5 in Long Beach where she had lived for many years.

Her eclectic repertoire included religious music, love songs, folk tunes and ballads, with her popularity peaking in the 1960s.

She sang with the Chorale for the decade of the 1950s and met her former husband, composer and director John Biggs, while both performed for Wagner. Terri often toured with the group, singing for such world events as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London.

She recalled later that members of the Chorale had to pay their own expenses for that trip, but added that Wagner personally mortgaged his home and borrowed money to make sure the group appeared.

“Roger could be so sweet,” she once told an interviewer, “but miss one note. . . . “

In addition to the Chorale, records and her solo concerts, Terri was a featured soloist with her husband’s John Biggs Consort, which concentrated on medieval and Renaissance music.

“Music begins in the home,” she told The Times in 1966 when she was expecting the couple’s second child. “It’s like having books and lovely things in a home--a child learns to appreciate them and makes a point of always including them in his life.”

With a master’s degree in music from USC, Terri was a professor of music and directed a women’s choir at UCLA.

Terri is survived by two daughters, Jennifer Biggs Walton and Adrienne Biggs, and three grandchildren.