In a cozy home a stone’s throw from Sarah Scott Middle School there lives a woman who carries within her a sizeable chunk of Wabash Valley history. Though she would be the first to say her life is rather unremarkable, it is hard to take her at her word. Not knowing how much she has witnessed as a lifetime Hautean. Not knowing the things that I know about her.

For the record, coming into this interview, here is what I know: I know that her name is Claudia Fitzsimmons Fulwiler. And I know that she has been a mainstay of the Wabash Valley music scene much longer than I have been alive. I also know that she is the epitome of gracefulness. Whether she is dressed in sensible and comfortable clothing for a night in with a good book, or decked out in a beautifully ornate gown for a performance, Claudia carries herself as though descended from royalty. The word I’ve been grasping for all night is elegant. Yes, Claudia is an elegant woman. Through and through. And I am only just beginning to really get to know her.

From the moment she opens her door one snowy evening in late January and invites me inside, until the moment she thanks me for visiting and apologizes for not offering coffee, Mrs. Fulwiler makes great company. Her smile is contagious. Like a yawn. Each time she laughs or grins, I find myself stifling a smile of my own. Her voice is like a fine glass of scotch. It is smooth and aged in just the right way. It is confident but humble. It is soft, and yet it carries within it the slightest grit of wisdom. It flits in and out of the ear like a hummingbird. And that is just when she’s speaking. So it is easy to imagine how it sounds set to music.

Hers is a modest, but lived-in home, the kind of place where every inch of the house has been and continues to be well used. Some might say utilitarian, but I say it matches her personality: classy, but no frills; to the point; humble. In her spotless living room, decorated sparsely but tastefully, the eye is drawn to the table full of portraits by the front door. There are lovely children of various ages and shades. There are attractive young couples and single portraits of regal adults. I want to ask her who these people are. But then again, there is a lot I want to ask Claudia, and I’m still trying to sort it all out. So the question goes unasked.

I have been told to ask about her “music room” while I am here, so I do, and I am led into a room devoted to a lifetime of music. Against one wall, a standup piano. Above that, photographs of some of the many musicians with whom she has performed over the years—far too many to name, though she certainly does. There is a cabinet crammed full of records that would make any vinyl enthusiast drool, a lifetime of piecemeal collecting that has led to an impressive assortment of true gems. There are CDs stashed here and there. Books of and about music, which, admittedly, I am tempted to crack open and smell when Claudia isn’t looking. The room—like its owner—is a shrine to a long life filled with music, plain and simple.

At this point, those who already know Mrs. Claudia Fitzsimmons Fulwiler are probably nodding their heads at the obvious truth to that statement. After all, she is, and has been for nearly fifty years, the lead and sole vocalist of the band Men of Note & Claudia. But whether or not you know of Claudia, you will most likely find it just as difficult as I do to believe her assertion that her life is unremarkable.

Allow me a little space to disprove her opinion.

Understanding Claudia requires a few things: The first is music. The second is love. The third is passion. Because Claudia’s story—indeed, her entire life—has been a whirlwind affair, romantic and passionate, centered around music.

Her earliest musical memories include standing eye-level with the keyboard of the family piano, sometime around the age of three or four, listening in awe to her aunts as they sang the popular hits of the time. Watching her recount this event, I realize that Claudia is briefly—ever-so-briefly—consumed by the flicker of this childhood memory. She gets excited. She squirms a little. Her eyes light up, and there on her face is a look that would not be difficult at all to imagine on the face of a three-year-old as she listens to her aunts’ voices singing. She is there again, relishing every note.

Still, though she might not remember it, though she might not have been there for an even earlier chapter in her family’s history, Claudia’s relationship with music is actually older than the memories of her singing aunts. It goes back to before her birth, when her father—known as “The Melody Lad”—worked for Terre Haute’s WBOW radio station, filling in the timeslot left vacant by Burl Ives after he moved on to pursue his national career. In fifteen-minute segments, Claudia’s father, accompanied by a pianist, would sing into the microphone, his voice carrying over the airwaves and into the homes of Valley listeners. All this had already occurred by the time she was a young child listening to her aunts, and yet it was an undeniable part of her. Singing was simply a part of her pedigree.

So it is only natural that a young Claudia would be consumed with music. It is only natural that some of her fondest memories as a teenager were of gathering up her allowance and taking the bus downtown to visit Paige’s record store, where she was exposed to some of her era’s greatest singers—Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and June Christy—while they were still on the rise. She took great pleasure in discovering them for herself while her peers were chasing down the more popular music of the time. She cut her teeth on a whole slew of up-and-comers, but even by her own admission, as lovely as the voices were, it was the music behind them that really stood out to her. She realized that the music makes the singer. The voice is another instrument in the orchestra. She wants to make sure I understand this, so she reiterates the point several times: No matter how great a singer is, the music behind her can elevate or devastate a singer’s sound and quality. It all has to flow seamlessly.

When I ask her when it all began—this lengthy and impressive singing career most notable for her nearly half-century tenure in Men of Note & Claudia—she tells me she never knew a time when she was not singing. It was as if I had asked her when she had first started breathing. The answer was right before me. So obvious. In fact, it is the reason I came to see her this evening when the streets are frozen and slick with January’s last snow. Because I already know this woman’s life is and always has been defined by music.

Claudia sang all through her school years. She sang with choral groups in competitions and sang at school revues and in musicals. Every opportunity that presented itself, she took advantage of it. There were vocal groups in high school, including one called The Misfits—a play on the “Fitz” of her last name Fitzsimmons and the fact that her brother was the sole male in the band, who hated singing but was cursed with a good voice and a sister who would not let it go to waste—and gigs with bands in town. There were performances on Bloomington’s WTTV station, on a show called Tonight in Indiana, which was a local lead-in to The Tonight Show with Steve Allen. There were recording jobs and major and minor bookings aplenty.

So there really wasn’t a time when Claudia was not singing. Singing is what she does. Some people build and some people parent and some people find religion or politics or other things to consume them. Claudia sings. It is her calling. Her life’s work.

Now, I know plenty of people who hate their jobs. In fact, it is more common to know people who dislike or barely stomach their jobs than it is to find people who love their vocation. It almost seems as if we have a constitutional right to complain about our jobs, to loathe our bosses and our meager pay, regardless of how much we actually make. Yet here is a woman who never really considered the two longest jobs she ever held in her life to be work. After all, nearly all the work she has ever done has been directly related to music.

From the beginning, like most musicians and artists attempting to juggle the dedication to their art with the realities of bills and life, Claudia worked a day job amidst all this music and singing and gigging and bringing Big Band to the Valley masses. Fresh out of high school, she made the most logical career choice possible—she applied to work at Columbia Records. It was a simple decision. What better than to work around music for a living? And the decision paid off. For 29 years Claudia clocked in at Columbia Records (which, of course, would later become Columbia House Music Club), and the result was a repertoire of stories so large that she can easily speak for hours on end about the many famous singers she has met through the years. But why all the celebrity visits to our little city? As Claudia explains it, even the most famous musicians wanted to see how records were actually pressed, so fascinated were they by the process. Each time a musician came through, Claudia made a concerted effort to cross his or her path. Most of the time she succeeded.

All these years later, she still looks back fondly her days at Columbia Records. All these years later, she is so thoroughly excited and invigorated by music—even just discussing it—that her joy is a virus.

*

It is impossible to talk about Claudia without bringing her late husband, Bill Fulwiler, into the discussion. Because they were married for 43 years, well over half of Claudia’s life, it is impossible to ask any question where her husband will not come into the answer somehow. He was, and he very much still remains, a large part of who Claudia is.

I want to ask so much about their long history together—their love of music, their love of each other, the places they’ve seen, the way they complemented and fulfilled each other’s lives—but these things are difficult. I’ve never had to directly question someone about a deceased loved one, let alone a spouse of over four decades. The one question I do try to ask, but fumble over, is about their relationship’s beginnings. How they met. How he proposed. The basics. I want to find some key to the longevity of a 43-year marriage. Because I want to know. Because marriages like these are rare. I want to ask how it was that two people found each other and fell in love and maintained that love over such a lengthy period of time. Through several wars, the Civil Rights movement, nine presidents. I want to ask what the chances are that two people so perfectly matched, who shared the same passions and the same fury inside for music, the unquenchable desire to create and perform it, how they could have crossed paths and found one another in a town the size of Terre Haute. But I fumble, and I strike a nerve within her and there’s a wavering in her voice, a hesitancy that speaks volumes. In the silence, in the fleeting watering of her eyes—there and gone before I recognize what I’m seeing—her reaction tells me that there is never a moment that she doesn’t think of him, try though she might. I want to know what makes a relationship like that work. I want to know about their life offstage. I want to know so much. But I backpedal. I return to the music. Because the music’s safe. And I’m not here to pick scabs or make new wounds.

So the story is this: One of Claudia’s first jobs, at the urging of her mother, was an audition for a band led by a man named Reese Williams. It turns out that Reese was in another band with Bill Fulwiler, but that’s just one of life’s coincidences. Because that’s not how Claudia met her future husband. The way she and Bill met is that she had been singing with a different band, preparing for the annual Battle of the Bands competition at the Terre Haute House’s famed Mayflower Ballroom. It was a major event. People came from all over the region and packed the ballroom. It was an affair not too much unlike Blues at the Crossroads. But indoors. And the music never stopped because there were stages on either end of the room, one band setting up while the other played. So she was practicing with a group of musicians, and then something fell through mere weeks before the competition. Claudia left the band. She had met Bill Fulwiler just a few days before all of this, trying out for a project or two, but nothing serious. At the same time she was leaving one band, another band, Bill’s band—Six Men of Note—were in need of a singer. Since Bill had recently worked with Claudia and knew her vocal range, he suggested to his bandmates that they ask her to join them. She did. And she has been with them ever since. Since 1957.

Over the years there has been a fair amount of publicity about Claudia’s late husband and their band. There have been articles. A PBS film is in the works. In the right circles, it is widely known that Bill Fulwiler was an astute and brilliant arranger of Big Band pieces. By Claudia’s count, he arranged or composed nearly a thousand pieces that comprise his “book,” the term used for his life’s work of arrangements and compositions, to which she owns the rights.

So just what made Bill Fulwiler so special? What made him stand out? It’s complicated. Suffice it to say that his genius, according to Claudia, was that he was able to rearrange popular Big Band pieces to suit the strengths of his bandmates. He exploited their strengths and avoided their weaknesses. And what does an arranger do? He takes pre-existing music—standards in the Big Band genre, for starters—and rewrites the individual parts to match his band. But Men of Note & Claudia is technically not a big band. They were never larger than eight members total, playing pieces written for bands usually double their size. And that’s where Bill Fulwiler’s brilliance came into play. He made his “little” band sound big. He rewrote the music to make his band sound like more than they physically were. And this idea of making “little” things seem big was another aspect of his amazing talent. His “little” dream of making great music with and arranging elaborate pieces for Men of Note & Claudia were, in reality, quite large. How else to explain the band’s longevity, how it even lives on without him, when the popularity of Big Bands has been on the wane for decades? How else to explain the feeling that for a while, when all of this got started, the “little” town of Terre Haute had a thriving live music scene, much more impressive and diverse than it would currently seem? Ask Claudia about this time, and she’ll quickly tell you her band was no anomaly. Indeed, there were a whole squad of female lead vocalists during this time—Nancy South and Marion Adami and Barbara Meadows, to name a few—so Claudia was part of a significant movement. There were so many other live acts, many of which were Big Bands, that it would be more than fair to call it Terre Haute’s musical boom. Yes, for a time, this little city loomed large.

Luckily, for those who remember this time and long for it, and for those who want to experience a piece of this Terre Haute history, Men of Note & Claudia—in large part thanks to the current band leader, George Graesch—are still carrying that “boom years” mantle. And they wear it well.

*
So what about the passion I mentioned earlier? Make no mistake, Claudia is a fiery ball of passion. The evidence is in the fact that she’s nearly three-quarters of a century old, and shows no signs of slowing down. She sings constantly. She speaks of her experiences with Men of Note & Claudia as if she’s only just joined the band, as if she’s only just learned enough songs to get up on stage with them and put on a show.

Though there have been difficult moments—the loss of grandparents, parents, and her late husband Bill—Claudia is quick to note that it is the passion for singing that gets her through these hard times. Probably, she explains, it is not much different for any musician who loves his work. You play through the hard times, as well as the good. Because you can’t not play. It is just who you are. It is who Claudia is.

Just before I stand to leave Claudia plays a recording of what she believes to be Bill’s greatest piece. It is an arrangement of “The Sheik of Araby,” which, admittedly, is a rambunctious and lively number. I think of the men performing, how exhausted it must have made them to play this song. But, when I look over at Claudia, I notice something entirely different. She has been transported away from me and this room. She is there—in the civic center where the recording was made all those years ago—watching and listening to her husband, picking apart the layers of instrumentation. She is so in love with this song, the memory that moment, when the players are chugging along and shredding a breakneck version of “Araby,” that it’s hard not to get up and dance. It’s hard not to fall in love with it myself. It’s hard to ignore the love and passion and music that seep from Claudia’s every pore.

Yes, passion is the very core of Claudia’s love for her husband, for her band, for her music, for her life’s work. Nowhere is it is more apparent than in her singing. After all these years, her voice is every bit as vulnerable and youthful as a newly minted vocalist. It is romantic, but not sappy or overextended. She sounds like a thicker-skinned young sister to Edith Piaf, minus the occasionally irreverent warble. There is a coyness, a slight air of tragic playfulness, that makes the listener realize that Claudia is not only confident, she is at her most content during her part of the arrangement, when she—the eighth instrument—joins in the music. Together they soar.

So, it is a love story, Claudia’s life. It has had all the ups and downs. The overwhelming moments of joy and the debilitating tragedy. But I’m convinced, still, that this is what happily ever after looks like. She is in love, still, with everything and everyone she has ever loved. This is what I’ve come to realize. The love. Of her husband. Of her music. Of the years that have been gifted to her.

I’m still trying to figure out how any of this is unremarkable.

Aaron Michael Morales is an English professor at Indiana State University. His first novel, Drowning Tucson, is available through all major booksellers. www.aaronmichaelmorales.com

Find Men of Note & Claudia on the web at: www.menofnoteband.tripod.com

Other articles by Aaron Michael Morales

• A Master Among Us - January 1st, 2010
• Child's Play - November 1st, 2009