The Rev. Lynn Cochran Wright had a unique ministry in Jackson, Wyo.: By day, he served at St. John’s Episcopal Church. By night, he played ragtime piano at the Silver Dollar Bar. Locals knew him as the “Ragtime Rev.”
“A lot of times people would ask him, ‘What do you like best, preaching or working in the bar?’ His reply was, they’re very similar. People go to church so they’re not alone, and they go to bars, they’re not alone,” said his friend and companion, Judy Guard of Marietta.
One of the clergyman's sons, Patrick Wright of Jackson, Wyo., said his father “touched a lot of people’s lives with his music.”
The Rev. Wright died Feb. 28 at Metropolitan Hospice and Palliative Care, Marietta, of squamous cell carcinoma. He was 73.
A memorial service and musical tribute to Rev. Wright is scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Saturday at the Church of the Atonement, 4945 High Point Road, Sandy Springs. Arrangements are being handled by SouthCare Cremation Society and Memorial Centers, Marietta.
The Rev. Wright was born in Athens, grew up in Birmingham and spent most of his adult life out West, but in 2010, a rekindled romance brought him back to his native Georgia. He and Ms. Guard had reconnected on Facebook.
“We were high school sweethearts, and both of us had been going our separate ways for many, many years,” Ms. Guard said. “We just discovered each other in the twilight of our years. He was in Idaho at the time, and asked if he could come see me in Georgia. So he did. And he stayed.”
The Rev. Wright was the fourth generation of his family to enter the ministry. His father served at an Episcopal parish in Birmingham. But at first, the son pursued a secular career.
By the age of 13, he was playing piano in clubs, dance studios and TV shows. After high school, he attended the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., then the U.S. Air Force Academy and finally, Birmingham-Southern College, where he received a bachelor's degree in psychology.
He taught and played piano in Birmingham through the 1960s and authored a textbook on improvisational performance, “Elements of Informal Music."
In the 1970s, the Rev. Wright moved West, taught at the University of Denver, ran a music studio and played at ski lodges in Crested Butte, Colo. In the early 1980s, he studied at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria to become an Episcopal priest.
In 1984, the Rev. Wright took a position at St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Dubois, Wyo., and led weekly services on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Crowheart. He served as assistant rector at St. John’s from 1990 to 2002.
“He’d often finish a sermon and walk straight to the piano … and sit down in his priestly vestments and play," Patrick Wright said. "He was an improvisational player.”
In Georgia, he preached once a month at the Church of the Atonement.
“One of the sermons I remembered he preached was on love – to love one another, care for one another, and the hardest one of all, forgive one another," Ms. Guard said. "He talked a lot about love of everybody, no matter who they were, how they thought or what they looked like."
Other survivors include brothers William Wright of the Birmingham, Ala. area and Ned Wright of Monroe County, W. Va.; son Brad Jaeckel of Moscow, Idaho, and two grandchildren.
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