After Mary Lee Sharp turned 100 in 2004, a group of University of Georgia researchers visited her several times to interview her. Her daughter, Mary Ann Sharp of Conyers, said they were fascinated by how keen her memory was and how nimbly she adapted to new experiences.
"I mean, how many 100-year-olds do you know who are using a computer for playing games, for exchanging emails and for keeping up with the news?" she said. "And Mama continued doing that into her 109th year."
Mary Lee Smith Sharp, 109, died Wednesday at her apartment at the Morningside of Conyers assisted living facility of complications from a head injury suffered in a fall. A memorial service, set for 2 p.m. Sunday at First Baptist Church of Decatur, will include works by Mozart, Brahms and Handel sung by the Decatur Civic Chorus.
Mary Lee Sharp was an accompanist for that group from 1949 to 1961. Her daughter, Mary Ann Sharp, has been the group’s music director for the past 50 years.
John Lemley, host of WABE’s “City Cafe,” met Sharp and her daughter two years ago for an interview about the chorus. Lemley said he thought the elder Sharp was “sunshine incarnate. She had a smile that seemed to go from head to toe.”
Lemley said she told him she refused to reveal her age until after she turned 100. “The reason was,” he said, “she didn’t want to be turned down for work as a church organist if people learned that she was in her 90s.”
Sharp was an organist and choir director for numerous churches in metro Atlanta and Jacksonville. She also gave private voice and piano lessons.
For the past 30 years she had been a kind of honored emeritus member of the Decatur Civic Chorus, known affectionately by all its members as “Ma Sharp.” She also was a lively travel companion on its trips to New York’s Carnegie Hall, Washington’s Kennedy Center and concert halls in Mexico and across Europe.
Patty Ireland of Stone Mountain, a fellow chorister, recalled that once, in the late 1990s, the group stayed at a hotel, and its lone elevator broke down. “We were obliged to take the stairs,” she said, “but Ma Sharp, who was still in her 90s, chose to slide down the bannister from the second floor to the lobby. She was always looking to make a grand entrance.”
For a 100th birthday gift, another chorister, Cindy Robinson of Tucker, took Sharp to a local book signing by former Georgian Stuart Woods, a best-selling crime novelist. "Ma Sharp thought it was a huge thrill to converse with her favorite author and take home a book autographed by him," she said.
Woods called her his oldest fan, Robinson added, “and he was so surprised to encounter her once again at another book signing six years later.”
Music wasn’t her only artistic outlet. She took lessons in painting after she turned 80 and devoted much of her time to capturing landscapes, seascapes and still-life studies in oils. They were good enough, her daughter said, that a Decatur gallery exhibited them during Sharp’s 100th year, “and she sold quite a few of them.”
Her husband of 54 years, Lester Sharp, died in 1982.
Additional survivors include a daughter, Jane Otten of Santa Fe, N.M.; a son, John Sharp of Harrisburg, Pa.; four grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.
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