Lyndell Leatherman

Lyndell Leatherman was born into a Nazarene parsonage in southeast Kansas in 1953. He began piano lessons at age eight, studying with his mother Wilma, a piano teacher and church musician (and still today—as an active octogenarian—organist in her local church in Eureka, Illinois). By the age of thirteen he was playing regularly in the Green Rock (now Colona), Illinos church where his father was then pastoring.

While attending Olivet Nazarene University, Kankakee, Illinois, he was privileged to study piano with Stephen Nielson and organ with Ovid Young, two keyboard artists who comprise the renowned duo known worldwide as Nielson and Young. After earning a degree in church and choral music at ONU, he continued his education with graduate studies in music theory and composition at Illinois State University, Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, where his composition professor was Panamanian-born Roque Cordero.

Since 1977 Lyndell has been immersed in sacred and educational music publishing—as an editor, composer, arranger, orchestrator, and engraver. He has concurrently served in local churches as a minister of music, orchestra director, organist, or pianist...and, since 1993, accompanist and staff arranger at First Church of the Nazarene of Kansas City, Missouri. In addition, he enjoys assisting in school and community musical theatre productions.

His family includes his wife, Barbara—also a musician as well as an artist and quilter—and three grown children and their families.

Used by permission of Lyndell Leatherman