Dr. Tumbleson was born in 1922 in Sac City, Iowa, the third of four children. His father, also John Raymond, was a Methodist minister, and his college-educated mother, Nellie, taught piano to private students. In high school, he won several Iowa State competitions in flute and vocal performance. In 1939, Tumbleson entered the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, in the music composition / vocal performance program. With the outbreak of World War II, however, he left Eastman and enrolled in the military. After basic training, he was assigned to the Army’s Signal Corps as a cryptologist and received training in German language and culture, plus math/cryptography. He served overseas in North Africa and in Italy from 1943-1945. While in Italy, he continued his musical training.

After the war’s end, Mr. Tumbleson went to Los Angeles, where he resumed his undergraduate studies in music at UCLA. During that time, he also performed in various tenor roles with the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera and toured with Xavier Cougat. Post-graduation, he joined the Savoy Opera Company in San Francisco, where he performed numerous tenor roles in the Gilbert & Sullivan repertoire. While performing with the Savoy on a tour across the US and Canada, he met his future wife, Treva. They married in 1949, and decided to remain in New York City; in his first audition he was cast in "Seventeen" at the Belasco Theater on Broadway.

During the next eight years, Mr. Tumbleson started a family while performing regularly with a number of musical groups, including the Robert Shaw Chorale. He performed solo and ensemble engagements on live Radio and TV shows, including regular spots with Tennessee Ernie Ford and with Perry Como. He became a contract performer at Radio City Music Hall while arranging and recording various standards and original songs.

Thanks to the G.I. Bill, Mr. Tumbleson also attended Teachers College of Columbia University, where he received an MA in Music Education. In the fall of 1958, he served as a visiting professor of vocal music at the University of Idaho. The following year, he returned to Los Angeles where he earned a doctorate from the University of Southern California in 1963. He moved his family to Ashland, Oregon, and joined the Music Faculty at what was then Southern Oregon College in the fall of that year, with the assigned brief to "get SOC noticed."

In addition to teaching general music, Dr. Tumbleson supervised individual performance majors and directed small- and large-group Choruses. One of these groups, "The Choraliers," travelled extensively, including trips to Montreal’s Expo ’67 and several Western European nations in 1973. In 1970, The Choraliers were selected by the USO to perform throughout the Pacific region. Under Dr. Tumbleson, they performed 55 ninety-minute shows over an eight-week period at US Army and Navy bases in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines.

Dr. Tumbleson also collaborated extensively with the SOC Drama Department to stage a variety of operettas and musicals, from "Gianni Schicci" and "Ahmal and the Night Visitors" to "South Pacific" and Sondheim’s "Company." For many years he also performed in recitals, especially Handel’s "The Messiah," and coached privately. For over thirty years, he served as Musical Director for the First Presbyterian Church in Ashland.

In 1976, Dr. Tumbleson founded the Rogue Valley Opera Association, an independent not-for-profit organization based in Medford, Oregon. Now known as Rogue Opera, the organization is still active and just completed a successful production of "The Marriage of Figaro" in May this year. He was a member of the national Board of Directors of the National Opera Association from 1982-84, and an occasional contributor to The Opera Quarterly (Oxford University Press.) He retired from SOSC in 1983.

Dr. Tumbleson published many musical works in his career. His last project was an "old-fashioned musical" based on a true story - the establishment and dissolution of the State of Jefferson. Jefferson State was intended to be a 49th state founded on libertarian principles and mutual concerns, created out of parts of northern California and southern Oregon. A workshop production of the musical was staged in Medford in 2005.

After his wife’s death, Dr. Tumbleson left Ashland in 2004. For the past four years, he has been living with his daughter Lisa in Woodstock, New York. With assistance, he continued work on a memoir of his WWII experiences, and on the musical.

He is survived by three children, Lisa, of Woodstock, NY, Paul, of Glen Ridge, NJ and Raymond, of Kutztown, PA. Dr. Tumbleson leaves behind five grandchildren, Jena and Emily Tumbleson and Elizabeth, Mary and John Raymond Tumbleson, III. He will be returned to Oregon in the late summer to be interred with Treva, his wife of 53 years.

The family requests that any charitable contributions in his memory be made to Rogue Opera, a federally-recognized 501(c)3 non-profit organization, at:

Rogue Opera

33 N Central Suite 424

Medford, OR 97501

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