On an Island full of coincidences and interesting interplay, brothers Wesley and Garrett Brown are a prime example of both. Raised in a Methodist clergy family, the preacher’s kids have each traveled separate circuitous routes to end up doing what may seem like the same thing: playing the organ at either end of Kennebec Avenue in Oak Bluffs each summer.
Wesley, the elder brother, first came to the Island back in 1972, to visit the family of his college roommate, Peter Boak, another Island musician. Now Wesley plays the organ at Trinity Episcopal Church, down by the Steamship dock. Garrett, who moved to the Vineyard just a few years before his brother retired here, is the music director at Union Chapel, the octagonal building at the other end of that short street a block off Circuit Avenue.
“You can say this is all Peter Boak’s fault,” Wesley says with a grin, as he chronicles his progress toward eventually living on the Vineyard. After that first visit, the two roommates from New Jersey’s Westminster Choir College spent a week one winter camping in the unheated summer cottage of Peter’s Uncle David. It was an inauspicious beginning to a longer adventure.
Not only did Peter introduce Wesley to the Island, but he’s been with both brothers as they navigate the Island’s classical music scene. The first winter he was on-Island, Garrett sang with the Island Community Chorus in Handel’s “The Messiah,” under Peter Boak’s direction, but soon found a larger role: For the Spring Concert in 2004, he became the accompanist, sharing the bench with his brother in a piano duet, then with Wesley and Peter for a performance of some Brahms Hungarian dances – one piano, six hands. Peter refers to Garrett Brown as “our orchestra,” which he was for many years, serving as the sole instrumentalist for many performances. His brother Wesley has entered into that Island musicians’ support system too, filling in for Garrett at Island Community Chorus rehearsals.
The Brown brothers share a common background, up to a point. At the church of their father, the Rev. Clemen Brown, in North Blenheim, New York, Wesley began as choir director at the age of thirteen. When Wesley left to go to college, then-ten-year-old Garrett took over for him. “Imagine going to church for the first time and seeing a kid at the organ,” Garrett says. Wesley was most impressed by his salary at the time, which was $1 a week; Garrett got double that when he took over. With ten years between them, the two sons managed to fill the job of church musician early and easily.
Both the brothers attended Westminster, some years apart. Wesley majored in education with a principle in organ, “trying to cover all bases,” he says. His career began right out of college: teaching music on an elementary level in New Jersey, while still carrying a church job. In 1976, he married Shelley West, a fellow student at Westminster. While talking about plans for the honeymoon, he suggested they take advantage of a good financial deal on a cottage on Martha’s Vineyard. Her reaction? “What would I want to go to an island for?”
When Wesley finally talked Shelley into trying a week here in 1982, they came and rented David Boak’s home for $50 a week. “We actually brought another couple with us, which made it only $25,” Wesley exclaims. Shelley loved it. The next year, they bought a home on June Avenue in Oak Bluffs, which they had to rent out to cover their payments, so they stayed again at the Boaks’ home. When David and Mary Boak returned to the Island after a tour of duty in Hawaii the following year, the Browns stayed in their own summer place. “Every summer, for an increasing amount of time each year, we would return,” Wesley says. In 1994, Wesley began to play the organ at Trinity Church when the previous organist decided to spend all year in New York City instead of returning for the summer. “I never did have a summer vacation after that,” says Wesley.
Garrett first spent a week back in 1985 at Wesley and Shelley’s place, bringing friends from England up from Texas, where he lived and worked doing graphic design. “After that, I came often in the summer,” says Garrett, who majored in church music and organ at Westminster, minoring “unwillingly” in voice. Garrett decided to come to the Island full-time in 1997, to work at the now-defunct Islander catalogue company in Vineyard Haven as a graphic designer. “My early careers here also included appraising antiques and cleaning houses,” he says, “but I was finally hired to play the organ and direct the choir at Grace Church in Vineyard Haven, without even an audition.” It was there that he directed an in-house production of Warren Martin’s version of Cinderella, updated and hip. When the catalogue company went under, Garrett reinvented himself (he easily slipped into the Island way of doing things) and now works as an administrator at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital.
Shelley and Wesley finally, in 2001, moved full-time to the Island after they both retired from teaching. They had already sold the June Avenue place in favor of a winterized home in Harthaven, so they made the move with their red Volvo station wagon and their vintage Buick convertible. Wesley notes that his life changed drastically. “Now I work just for three months a year and we have entered into the amazing music community here,” he says. Shelley, who initially wondered whatever one would want to come to an island for, has found a whole new challenging way of life. She was immediately cast in several musical productions and joined the Island Community Chorus, under Peter Boak’s direction.
Garrett, who now by further coincidence lives on June Avenue, but not in the same house as Wesley and Shelley’s, has found the music community here to be outstanding also. “There’s such interaction between musicians, both singers and instrumentalists, here.” In his job at the Union Chapel, he plays the organ and directs a paid quartet. Occasionally, he needs a particular instrumentalist, and says, “For the most part, you can find just what you need for musicians here – and they’re good.”
And so the Brown brothers, who arrived at different times, for different purposes, immediately became part of the year-round music and arts community here on Martha’s Vineyard. Years ago, this never seemed a possibility. As Garrett says, “It’s hard to believe that two brothers – ten years apart in age, who grew up in the Catskills, then went their separate ways, one living and teaching in New Jersey, and the other living in Texas – would eventually both move north to this little Island. Yet here we are!”
