A Different Kind of Heavy Metal Fan

COOKEVILLE, Tenn. —  A little more than an hour’s drive from the fiddles and guitars of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, central Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau echoes with the distinctive “oom-pah” of the tuba.

Not just one tuba. Twenty tubas.

It’s the tuba ensemble at Tennessee Technological University, directed by R. Winston Morris, music professor and tuba lover who promotes the beefy brass instrument mostly associated with snappy marches and earthy polkas.

Morris doesn’t care much for the way the public perceives his instrument of choice.

“They think we can only play two notes,” he says.

Morris, 56, may be the country’s preeminent authority on the tuba. Surely he’s the most passionate. Ask Morris something about the tuba and he unleashes a fusillade of facts.

“In many respects, it’s the most difficult to play,” he says. “It’s the largest instrument and takes the largest column of air, four times the trumpet. Some people find it impossible to play.

“However, it’s not how much air you’ve got but how you control it --getting good gas mileage, so to speak.”

Morris has toured in the United States, Australia, Europe and Japan. He or his ensembles have performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Sydney Opera House, New York’s Carnegie Hall, Switzerland’s Montreaux International Brass Congress and the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans.

In 1973 he published “The Tuba Music Guide,” an annotated bibliography of tuba music, and last year he edited “The Tuba Source Book,” a textbook for tuba lovers.

Morris is founder of the 2,500-member Tubists Universal Brotherhood Assn.--TUBA.

“The tuba’s been good to me,” the slender, bespectacled Morris says.

It all began when his eighth-grade band director asked for someone to play the tuba, and Morris raised his hand.

Loyal to a fault, Morris plays no other instruments. Only tubas are featured in the posters and photographs that adorn his office walls. One photo shows his ensemble at a local junkyard, where they climbed atop discarded cars to shoot the cover for the CD “Heavy Metal.”

There’s a keepsake from daughter Sheila Renee, now 33, who scribbled on a practice tablet when she was learning to print: “My dad has a big tuba.”

Leaning against a wall is his $10,000 tuba, in a black nylon bag.

“People think I’m lugging golf clubs around,” he says.

Ever industrious, he’s helped finance his travels by manufacturing and selling tuba mutes, the conical devices that slide into the bells of tubas to muffle their sound.

And he has an inch-thick file of correspondence sent to dictionary editors suggesting they include the entry “tubist.” That’s without the “a”--and it’s important to Morris.

“It’s cellist, not celloist, right?” he says.

Justin Henderson of Laurel, Md., has studied under Morris for five years. He called him “a superman.”

“You come in and he’s on the phone to people in Sweden. He writes books, visits everywhere and does transcriptions,” Henderson says.

Adds Greg Danner, chairman of Tennessee Tech’s music and art department, “We get calls from around the world from students because of his reputation.”

Morris is at an unlikely tuba mecca: 28% of Tennessee Tech’s 8,300 students are engineering majors, and Cookeville is near the heart of country and bluegrass music--hardly tuba territory.

Morris ended up at Tech “because 30 years ago that’s where the job was”--a music department posting for a professor to teach the tuba.

“My objective is to get respect for the tuba--elevate the popular image of the instrument,” Morris says.