Larry Norman - Early Life

Early Life

Larry Norman was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, the oldest son of Joe Hendrex "Joe Billy" Norman (December 9, 1923 – April 28, 1999), who had served as a sergeant in the US Army Air Corps during World War II and worked at the Southern Pacific Railroad while studying to become a teacher, and his wife, Margaret Evelyn "Marge" Stout (born in 1925 in Nebraska). After Norman's birth his parents joined the Southern Baptist church, which prohibited dancing, going to the cinema, and "almost everything that didn't occur inside ". Because of his religious convictions, Norman's father discouraged any interest in music by his children. Norman noted, "We were poor and I had no children's records in Texas. But I listened to my parents' radio whenever they turned it on. I developed an appreciation for swing music, big band arrangements and solo singers like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby". Also from an early age, he listened to the "blues and Negro spirituals on 78s his grandfather had collected". Other musical influences he later acknowledged included gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, Belgian jazz musician Django Reinhardt, American concert singer Paul Robeson, and Black comedian Bert Williams. Norman was strongly influenced also by classical music, jazz, blues music, and black gospel music, but "didn't like country and western ... because of the nasal, twangy vocals", or "some kinds of fast-paced jazz".

In 1950 Norman and his parents moved to San Francisco where the family attended a Black American Pentecostal church, later they attended the First Baptist Church at 22 Waller Street where Norman became a Christian in 1952 at the age of five. He began composing songs around this time. He stated, "I started to write music when I was four or five and didn't realise I was composing tonally because I was simply using the piano". He recalled: "When I was five I wrote a song about the rain because I loved the San Francisco drizzles, and later I wrote about a dog because I couldn't have one, and a clown because my uncle was a circus performer, and when I was eight I wrote a song about a cowboy in the desert watching the stars at night and thinking about God because I often looked at the stars and tried to picture Heaven", inspired by seeing Roy Rogers and hearing Dale Evans give her testimony at the civic auditorium. Among his earliest songs were "Lonely Boy" (1956); "The Man From Galilee" (1956), "inspired by Sunday School stories"; the unreleased "Bopping With My Girl"; "My Feet are on the Rock" (1958); "The Thanksgiving Song" (1959); and "Country Church, Country People" (1959), which was written for his grandmother Lena.

From 1956 Norman was fascinated with the music of Elvis Presley. According to Norman, his father banned him from listening to rock and roll music on the radio. Norman frequently accompanied his father on Christian missions to prisons and hospitals. In 1959 he performed on Ted Mack's syndicated CBS television show The Original Amateur Hour. In 1960 his father accepted a teaching job in San José, California. The family lived in Campbell, California. Later, while a junior at Campbell High School, he was the youngest person voted into the Edwin Markham Poetry Society, and won first place in the Society's student poetry contest. Norman won an academic scholarship to major in English at San Jose State College. By the fall of 1965 Norman left the family home and rented an apartment in Downtown San Jose. After one semester, he "flunked out of college and lost scholarship".