Music: Minstrel of the Cloth

At Detroit’s third annual Festival of American Music, the beat was strictly jazz, and the performers were pure cream: Dave Brubeck and Count Basie on the ivories, Pete Fountain on the clarinet, Jack Brokensha on the vibes, and Cannonball Adderley, the meanest alto sax this side of Basin Street. The cats in the crowd yowled for all of them. But they also cheered for a bulky banjo player, clad in a cleric’s cassock, who sat in the midst of a stripe-blazered combo and lined out Bill Bailey and Paddlin’ Madeleine Home with minstrel zest and skill. This improbable jazz musician was Father John Joseph Dustin. 45, a Redemptorist priest, who has been strumming the banjo for 36 years.

In Detroit Father Dustin is as well known for his accomplishments on the banjo as he is for his work at the city’s Holy Redeemer Church. Songs Father Taught Me, a record album that he cut with his own Dixieland combo of six lay musicians, is the fastest-selling disk in town (more than 5,000 to date). Says Marvin Jacobs, general manager of Detroit’s Music Merchants, Inc., Father Dustin’s distributor: “In the language of the record industry, he’s got it in the groove.”

Father Dustin’s avocation was born in an alley back home in St. Louis, where, as a boy of seven, he discovered “a busted mandolin in a trash barrel, tuned it like a uke, and started picking at it.” Rhythm came naturally; his father was a lyricist and vaudeville performer, his mother a pianist and singer who organized and led a 15-piece, all-male dance band. Father Dustin, who never wanted to be any thing but a priest, nevertheless departed for a seminary at 15 with his banjo on his knee. Assigned after ordination to the Holy Redeemer Church in Detroit, he took to playing his repertory of 250 jazz standards at high school dances, benefits, meetings of the Holy Name Society and the Altar Society.

Because “a rectory with 16 priests is no place for banjo practice,” Father Dustin warms up in a flower shop across the street — an arrangement so mutually satisfactory that the florist has sold 300 of the Father’s albums since July. Father Dustin humbly attributes this success to an order of cloistered nuns who, “when they get the time, say a prayer for the success of the album. Not many records have that help going for them.”

Although some fellow priests regard with disapproving coolness Father Dustin’s jazz success, he does not mind. All the income from his banjo—concert fees and record royalties—goes to the order, for its missions in Thailand and Brazil. Furthermore, Detroit’s musical priest thinks he has an excellent precedent: St. Alphonsus Ligouri, founder of the Redemptorist Order (in 1732) was a cool man on the harpsichord.