The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

BOGGESS, MILDRED MORFORD ANDREWS (1915–1987).

An organist and professor of music at the University of Oklahoma, and perhaps the preeminent teacher of the organ in the United States, Mildred Andrews was born in Hominy, Oklahoma, on September 25, 1915, to George and Clara Park Andrews. Her parents recognized her talent and scraped together enough money to pay for piano lessons. She was playing by the age of six, and by the time she was in high school, she herself was giving piano lessons to Hominy youths.

She saw her first organ as a freshman at Bethany College, Lindsborg, Kansas. After a year she transferred to the University of Oklahoma (OU) where she finished an undergraduate degree in piano in 1937. Recognizing her extraordinary gifts, her teachers hired her as a junior to assist in teaching piano and organ. In 1940 she earned a master=s degree from the University of Michigan in 1940 and continued a three-decade career at OU.

She trained at least fourteen Fulbright scholars and twenty winners of important national competitions. Her students occupied prominent positions as teachers, performers, and church organists everywhere. Significant figures in the music world constantly urged her to give up teaching for a career in performance. Although she made frequent concert appearances and conducted numerous workshops across the country, she followed her calling as a teacher.

She received numerous honors. In 1959 the American Guild of Organists named her the outstanding organ teacher in the United States and Canada. She was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1971 and in 1967 was awarded the University of Oklahoma’s Distinguished Service Citation. In 1963 she was the first woman in the OU College of Fine Arts to be named a David Ross Boyd professor. She was one of only a few persons ever allowed to pay the organ at Westminster Abbey in England, and she conducted master classes at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. In 1974 Mu Phi Epsilon international professional music fraternity gave her the annual Elizabeth Mathis Award for outstanding achievement in the field of music.

She was known as a person of gentle charm, dignity, and enormous self-discipline, quite indifferent to fame. Her students were her only children, and they returned her care with affection and gratitude. She played the organ at Norman’s St. John’s Episcopal Church from 1936 to 1962. In 1973, at fifty-eight, she married Rough Boggess, an assistant to the University of Oklahoma dean of admissions. She retired in 1975 as one of the most distinguished members of the faculty. Mildred Andrews Boggess died on August 10, 1987, at seventy-one. The Boggess estate bequeathed the university funds needed to purchase a magnificent pipe organ, which sits on the balcony of Gothic Hall in the Catlett Music Center. In 1997 the organ was named in her honor.

David W. Levy