‘Sing us a song, you’re the Piano Man.’ Charlotte’s Bill Branner to go out on a high note.
On the day before he died — two weeks after his 90th birthday — Bill Branner awoke at home from a deep sleep and spontaneously broke out in song, the last one he would ever sing.
While the Charlotte native had a long and successful career in insurance, he was widely known around town as “The Piano Man,” a longtime volunteer musician at the Novant (Presbyterian) hospitals in Charlotte and Matthews who also had been the musical force in his own family for more than a half century, according his son, Dr. William Branner of Charlotte.
Bill Branner taught himself the piano as a teenager, in part when he was home recovering from a bout of rheumatic fever. He performed at the hospitals into his late 80s, taking requests or choosing his songs from a list of hundreds of titles he compiled through the years and kept in his wallet.
Branner played by ear. Yet when he lost almost all of his hearing in later life, every note of the songs he performed stayed clear and complete in his mind. At one point he considered cochleal implants to better communicate with his family but decided against them because they damaged the sound of the notes he played. Music meant that much.
Which brings us back to his final solo. The song that came bubbling out of Bill Branner on the last full day of his life does not appear on the list from his wallet. In fact, his children had never heard him sing it before.
“Walking the Floor Over You” made Ernest Tubb a star back in 1941 when Bill Branner was 9. Why Branner chose to sing it on his deathbed remains a family mystery.
Maybe, William surmises, his father had cued up the soundtrack of his life for the final time. Or maybe the lyrics in Tubb’s last stanza offer the rest of us a clue.
“Just keep right on walking and it won’t hurt you to cry. Remember that I love you and I will the day I die.”
Bill Branner died on the afternoon of Saturday, Aug. 27, at his home in south Charlotte, surrounded by his wife, Christine, and their four children.
In those final days, Bill’s beloved “Andy Griffith Show” had been put on reel-to-reel on the bedroom TV. At one point, he awoke, smilingly called out the name of Ernest T. Bass, then immediately fell back to sleep.
But in the last moments, there was not much said. William Branner had one hand on his father’s heart while the other was taking his father’s pulse when Bill tried to say something that nobody in the room could quite make out. Then he closed his eyes.
“That was it,” William says. “The day the music died.”
Not yet, y’all. Not quite yet.
A musical life
Bill Branner sprung from deep Charlotte roots. His grandfather ran a mule-and-wagon hauling business in the 1890s. His parents owned a shoe repair shop off Central Avenue.
Just as a song moves among a few chords, Branner’s long life took shape hinged to a few key moments.
The first: when his sister didn’t make a go of her piano lessons and left an opening on the piano bench for him. When he was recovering at home from his illness, Branner spent hours consuming every volume of his family’s World Book encyclopedias and learning his way through the keys. On his first trip the buy sheet music, he came home with Chopin, not “Chopsticks.”
The second: when he scored so high on a military technical aptitude test that the Army made him a radio technician instead of handing him a gun before it sent him to Korea. Unlike thousands of others, Bill Branner came home.
The third: what Hollywood writers might call “the meet-cute.” It played out in 1957 when Branner took a date to the Elks Club on Tryon Street and instead met Christine Hairr, the daughter of eastern North Carolina tenant farmers. The year before, Christine had won the Miss Sampson County beauty pageant after picking tobacco and cotton with her family for most of the day. When she finished second in the Miss North Carolina Pageant held in Charlotte that year, her picking days were done, and she stayed in the big city.
At the Elks Club, Christine saw Bill Branner before he saw her and asked for an introduction, she says. Christine’s talent in the beauty pageant competitions had been singing. Now she had her accompanist. She and Bill were married for 64 years.
One last song
There is also a fourth.
Branner, you see, was shy at first about playing the piano in public. William suspects his father did not think he was good enough to be heard outside the walls of his home or beyond the select audience of family and close friends.
So after Bill retired, Christine had to talk him into auditioning to join the other volunteer pianists at Presbyterian. “Then he wouldn’t stop,” she says.
He wound up playing before a rotating audience of nurses, doctors, patients and their families for almost 15 years, stopping only when Novant had to change its volunteer policies to cope with the pandemic.
Branner’s hospital performances were featured in a 2011 story in The Charlotte Observer. He was 79 at the time.
“I just pray every morning that my playing lets me touch somebody,” he said.
As his confidence in his hospital performances grew, so did the list of songs Branner would jot down to play. By the end of his life, Branner still carried two dog-eared sheets of paper in his wallet that carried 300 song titles, all broken down by musical genre, and stacked in two single-spaced columns. He was ready if the hospital ever called him back.
After Branner’s death, the list was put to a different use, as a family reference guide on what song to play at The Piano Man’s graveside sendoff on Saturday, Sept. 3, at Sharon Memorial Park. The discussion went on for days.
There will be “Taps,” of course, in honor of Branner’s service in Korea. But the family will offer the first tune, courtesy of William’s son, Will, and Will’s fiancee, Danielle Wade, who are both Broadway performers.
The couple is making the trip from New York to Charlotte to sing just one song, one song selected from the 300 on Bill Branner’s playlist, one song to sum up his life. The family’s choice:
“Unforgettable.”
This story was originally published September 1, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
