Marvin Vincent Ponder
1944
-
Marvin Ponder, a tenor, is an
ordained Seventh-day Adventist minister who has also enjoyed a successful
career as a singer of both folk and religious music. He is widely known within
the Adventist community, having sung on college and university campuses and for
numerous evangelistic and other church meetings as a soloist and as a member of
several quartets and vocal ensembles.
Marvin was born in Galveston,
Texas, one of three children born to Bernard W. and Ethel Mae Vincent Ponder.
When he was five, his family moved to La Marque, Texas, where he spent most of
his childhood. Marvin recently recalled the influence his father had on his
musical training:
My
Dad had grown up playing the guitar and singing in East Texas with his three
brothers in the Ponder Brothers Band, a country music group. Although they
never became professional, they sang all over east Texas. He brought music into
our home when we were just children and taught me to play the ukulele when I
was six. I began performing with him and my sister, Patsy, at various church
and civic gatherings.
When
I became a teenager, I graduated to the guitar, and played and sang with a
local teen rock n' roll band, "The Markees."
We sang in the south Texas area for a short time and while in this group I had
my first experience with recording music. It was a "one-hit wonder"
type of group that didn’t last very long when everyone started separating to go
off to college.
Marvin attended the local
high school until the end of his junior year, when he went to the academy on
the campus at Southwestern Junior College, now Southwestern Adventist
University, in Keene, Texas, to complete his senior year. During that year he
had his first experience in choral singing. He recently observed,
I
joined the college choir and The Choraliers, the
traveling choral group for the college, directed by Paul Hill. Paul had a
tremendous influence in my life during my time at Keene, opening up all kinds
of new possibilities in music, sacred and otherwise. Although I never took any
formal voice lessons from him, he helped me develop in my solo performance as
well as ensemble singing. It was during this time that I joined the college
quartet, The Knights of Harmony, as their second tenor. We sang all over the
Southwest, representing the college, and later we all went to Union College,
where we continued to sing.
When
we arrived at Union College in 1963, the choir director refused to let us join
any of the choral groups on campus unless we disbanded the quartet. So we opted
to keep the quartet. Unfortunately, the result was I never really sang in any
of the formal choral groups at Union, which was a real loss to me in terms of
further vocal training and experience. In an ironic twist, the college public
relations department recruited us to travel throughout the Northern and Central
Unions to sing and promote the college. Although we sang mostly gospel music,
we also sang barbershop music as well, as we visited churches and academies.
In 1961 Ponder joined with
Herman Harp, baritone in the quartet, to form a folk-singing duo, The Discords.
Folk music was popular at this time in the U.S., and they traveled and
performed on college and university campuses in hootenannies and folk singing
festivals, modeling their presentation of music and banter after that of the
then popular Smothers Brothers duo. They would continue as a folk-singing duo
until the early 1970s.
When Ponder had enrolled at
SWJC in 1962 following graduation from academy, he had pursued a major in
theology and a minor in Biblical languages. Following his transfer to UC in
1963 and graduation in 1966, he continued his education at Andrews University,
where he completed an M.Div. in 1968. For the next
four years he pastored churches in the Texas Conference, working in youth
evangelism, conducting weeks of prayer at Adventist schools, and participating
in youth rallies, Bible conferences, and evangelism. He was ordained as a
minister in the summer of 1972.
That fall, he became campus
chaplain at Union College, a position he held for the next five years. While at UC, he and Harp began collaborating with Gene and Marie
Jennings of Nashville, Tennessee, becoming known as Ponder, Harp &
Jennings. From 1974 to 1996 they gave concerts nationwide and recorded
ten gospel music albums. Two of these, Unmerited Favor and Newborn
Feeling, won Angel Awards, the first as Best Gospel Group and the second as
Best Gospel Album. In 2006, ten years after they had ended their ministry, they
reunited for a farewell reunion concert tour.
Ponder has continued singing
as a soloist and as worship music leader at the Loma Linda Church, where he has
been a member of the pastoral staff since 1977. He has appeared in several of
the Family Reunion music videos produced by the Voice of Prophecy and briefly
sang in a southern California quartet, Called IV. He also recorded a solo
album, Steps.
Ponder married Shirley
Huffman, a native of Kansas City, Missouri, in 1966. They have two sons, who
are both active as musicians. The older, Christopher,
is a bass who sang in the La Sierra University Octet under William Chunestudy and has studied vocal performance with William
Carey in New Hampshire. He is an active participant in musicals and opera in
that region.
The other son, Jonathan, a
tenor and performer of several string instruments, resides in Ann Arbor,
Michigan. He is very involved in folk music in that area and is well known as a
folk singer and songwriter.
ds/2011
Sources:
Information provided by Marvin Ponder, September, 2011; Southwestern Union
Record, 1 March 1972, 2; Central Union Reaper, 11 July 1972, 3;
Other Online Sources.
Discography
Records/CDs
Ponder,
Harp, and Jennings
Heaven
Has Joys, Chapel
Records, 1977
All
in the Name of Jesus,
Chapel Records, 1978
Glory
in the Cross,
Chapel Records, 1980
Highest
Praise, Chapel
Records, 1982
Anticipating
Good Things,
Chapel Records, 1985
Only
Jesus, Chapel
Records, 1988
Unmerited
Favor, Chapel
Records, 1990
Best
of Ponder, Harp, and Jennings,
Chapel Records, 1992
Newborn
Feeling, Chapel
Records, 1994
Ponder,
Harp, and Jennings Live,
Reunion Concert, DVD/CD, Loma Linda University Church Media Ministries
Department, 2006
Marvin Ponder
Steps, Chapel Records, 1977
Marvin Ponder and Herman Harp +
Homesick
For Heaven, Knights
of Harmony Quartet, 1962
Green
Leaves of Summer, folk music album, 1964
God
is So Wonderful,
Chapel Records, 1973
Songs
of Faith, Book
10, Christian Record, 1975
Songs
of Faith, Book
12, Christian Record, 1977