Whether Jimmy Jones was on a grand stage or dressed as a T-Rex, his music captivated

Jimmy Jones could put on a white tie and tails, sit down at an organ, and captivate large audiences of paying classical-music lovers — as he did, for instance, with the symphonies in Cape Town, South Africa, Sacramento and Portland, Maine.

But while doing so would bring him joy, Jones almost certainly would have said he experienced even greater pleasure as an artist in church, his spouse Robert Moody believes.

While wearing a dinosaur costume.

“If he were in this conversation right now, he would talk about how putting together the most impactful, artistically satisfying, musical, Easter Sunday-morning service was more important than playing a concerto with the New York Philharmonic,” Moody says.

Jones’ passion, he continues, was “reaching not just musical heights, but spiritual heights. ...

“He did do a good number of the great organ concertos with great orchestras. But I think he was much, much, much more proud of his ‘Phantom of the Organ’ Halloween concert for kids at Myers Park, where he dressed up like a T-Rex and played music from ‘Jurassic Park.’”

James Jones — who spent more than a decade as a dynamic and beloved director of music at Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte — died suddenly last Sunday at his home in Memphis, Tennessee.

Moody, himself music director of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, says the coroner’s initial observation was that his spouse of 18 years had a heart attack. Jones was 41.

‘You were just anointed by God’

Jones’ parents are not farmers, but they live on a beautiful piece of farmland in Lee County (about 2-1/2 hours east of Charlotte), where Jones grew up four-wheeling and deer hunting and fishing. Even so, his family also had a strong affinity for classical music, so it’s little surprise that Jones ended up in front of a piano at a young age.

He was introduced to the organ when he was about 11 years old, while in a summer program for gifted students. And he fell for it, hard.

“I’ll never forget this,” recalls his original organ teacher, Danny Hester. “We had a new pipe organ at my church — Jonesboro United Methodist Church in Sanford — and it had been a very popular thing in town because everybody loved hearing it. He was taking lessons on that, and at the end of his second lesson, he got off the bench and walked about halfway across the pulpit area, stopped, stood there, looked up at the pipes, and smiled. His eyes just glowed.

“I thought, Ohhhh, young boy. You don’t know it, but you were just anointed by God. Your life is music.”

Hester, now adjunct professor of organ at Campbell University in Buies Creek, says Jones had a natural gift but also worked tirelessly. He remembers occasions when Jones would extend his own practice sessions so long that Hester actually had to kick his student off the organ ... because it was eating into time that he needed to spend practicing.

Before Jones had even turned 12, he earned his first payday — $25 — as an organist for a one-off local Sunday-morning church service. (His parents never cashed the check, and it sits in a frame over the organ in Jones and Moody’s home.)

By 15, Jones had a steady gig at Divine Street United Methodist Church in Dunn, 40 miles south of Raleigh. He sat at the organ there pretty much every Sunday until heading off to study organ performance at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem.

While working on his bachelor’s degree, he got hired as organist and choirmaster for Westminster Presbyterian Church and its roughly 2,000-member congregation in nearby Greensboro, and after graduating moved to the Gate City full-time.

His new hometown would prove fruitful: It’s where he would earn his master’s degree in choral conducting (from UNC Greensboro) and, more significantly, where he’d meet the love of his life.

Jones and Moody — then the brand-new music director of the Winston-Salem Symphony — met through an online dating site in 2005.

Moody noticed Jones’ screen name had the word “musician” in it, and so he just came right out and asked. “What type of music?,” said his first-ever message to Jones. The reply that came back was just as direct.

“Classical.”

“And the rest is history,” Moody says.

‘It was the best hire I ever made’

James Howell, longtime senior pastor at Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, remembers the day in 2010 when he met Jones to discuss the opening they had for a music director and organist.

“We talked, gosh, three hours. I didn’t intend to,” says Howell, whose church’s membership was more than twice the size of the one Jones was at in Greensboro. “We just got to talking about the church, music, God, life, everything. And during that conversation, he asked me — I mean, the way he phrased it was amazing — ‘Will I get to work with the children?’

“With a lot of (people interviewing for) senior music positions, it’s like, ‘Will I have to work with the children?’”

Howell was sold, even though Jones practically appeared to be a kid himself. “He looked 17. He was 29,” Howell recalls. “And churches like ours don’t tend to hire a 29-year-old. But it was the best hire I ever made.”

One of the first programs Jones created saw him dressing up the sanctuary that October with fake cobwebs, blacklights, and other assorted Halloween decorations. Called “Phantom of the Organ,” he would combine spooky-sounding organ music and popular songs while wearing, yes, a costume for the occasion.

Over the next decade, he turned Myers Park UMC into a musical juggernaut, commissioning a diverse selection of masterworks; creating a Christmas concert so big it needed to be shifted to a larger venue and split into two performances; growing the chancel choir to nearly 100 singers; and leading the chancel and chamber choirs on three European tours.

Basically, Howell says, “He elevated our music program from really good to just-frickin’-amazing.”

Perhaps equally remarkable? Jones somehow managed to make playing an organ seem cool. “Phantom of the Organ,” for instance, “got kids interested in the organ,” Howell says. “They would come up and want to see it.”

On top of that, his style of playing was enchanting in its physicality.

“He was so into it,” says Kevin Proffit, Myers Park UMC’s tenor section leader and a member of the choir since before Jones took it over. “I mean, he moved. Lots of movement, and you could hear him breathing at times, and his fancy pedal work with his feet was really impressive. It was a joy to watch — and a joy to hear.”

But perhaps more than anything, those who knew him best say, it was a joy to simply be in his orbit at all.

Moody says his spouse “very easily won the hearts of the littlest kids and the eldest persons in the church,” and in turn, the church had apparently won Jones’ heart: When Moody’s hiring by the Memphis Symphony Orchestra in 2016 necessitated a move to Tennessee, Jones stayed in Charlotte to continue his work with the church, with the couple doing the long-distance thing for the next five years.

It wasn’t until 2021, during COVID, that Jones finally decided it was time to join Moody in Memphis.

But in many ways, his heart stayed in Carolina.

‘Everyone in heaven knows this’

It was clear from his final Facebook post.

Last Saturday night, Jones — dressed in a navy-blue Carolina hoodie and a gray UNC ballcap — posted a video on the site of him saying a prayer with his and Moody’s dog Presley, whom he’d squeezed into a Carolina-blue T-shirt. Jones was praying for the UNC Tar Heels men’s basketball team to beat the Duke Blue Devils with his tongue in his cheek, deadpanning that, “well, Devils just don’t belong to the kingdom of God, Lord.”

The Tar Heels would go on to beat the Blue Devils, 93-84.

So, although it’s very small consolation, there’s good reason to believe Jones died happy. There’s also reason to believe he’s smiling right now in the afterlife, too, Moody says.

He explains: “The operatic superstar Renée Fleming, who just won the Kennedy Center Honors a couple months ago, we know her,” Moody says, “and I did not reach out to her, but somehow the word got to her, and she sent me the most beautiful text saying how sorry she was and how much she loved Jimmy.

“I will tell you, if he’s able to share this news in heaven, everyone in heaven knows this by now: that he got a text from Renée Fleming. He would be putting that on a billboard.”

Moody has to fight back tears as he talks over the phone, from the passenger seat of a car headed from Tennessee to North Carolina for Saturday’s memorial service in Sanford for Jones. He’s still reeling from the shock of the tragedy, he says, and adds that he canceled all of his music-directing obligations for the next month.

There is one date in March, however, he left alone. One he doesn’t dare miss. On March 10, at Arizona Musicfest in Scottsdale, Moody will lead the festival orchestra as it presents the premiere of a performance by ...

... Renée Fleming.

“There’s no way I could cancel that, because he would have my head,” Moody says. “He was slated to play piano in the orchestra with her, and he was so incredibly looking forward to it.”

He takes a slow, deep breath.

“We had planned for many, many more years than this,” he says, then pauses one more time before adding, “but I’m so grateful for the 18 that we got.”