Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 6, 1994 TAG: 9407060065
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By TODD JACKSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The son left and returned awhile later with a dozen red roses for Peyton's wife, Barbara, on the couple's 26th wedding anniversary.
Peyton, a well-known gospel singer and founder of the Southern Statesmen quartet, battled cancer for nine years. He died Friday morning at the age of 56.
"I just couldn't believe he could do something like that with all the pain he had," Barbara Peyton said Tuesday, standing in front of her husband's portrait in the parlor of their home on Clarke Avenue Southwest. "He looked at me, and I just know he was thinking: 'I did it.'''
Peyton's funeral was Tuesday morning. Later in the afternoon, his wife stood in their home holding a white ribbon she had taken off a bouquet of flowers. In gold letters, the ribbon read, "Singin' in Heaven."
"I know he's singing in the big choir," she said.
Bill Peyton could play just about any instrument he was asked to play. He traveled with his evangelist father, the Rev. Harry R. Peyton, when he was a boy. He then "went his own way," Barbara Peyton says.
At age 47, he accepted God into his life. Four months later, he was diagnosed with cancer. He lost a kidney soon after, but fulfilled a lifelong dream in 1987 when he started the Southern Statesmen.
The group traveled across the country, and Peyton took his cancer with him, refusing to give in to it. With no successful treatment available for renal cell - or kidney - cancer, Peyton decided to volunteer for Interleukin-2, an experimental treatment administered at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.
"His doctors said he was one of the longest-living people with his type of cancer," Barbara Peyton said. "He just wouldn't quit."
She and others who knew Peyton said his life with the disease was an inspiration to others. In addition to the renal cancer, he had other forms of the disease.
"I remember one time when we had to actually carry Bill into a restaurant so he could eat," said Tommy Barlow, a member of the Southern Statesmen. "But he leaned up against a podium and sang that night. The Lord gave him enough strength to perform, but he was always exhausted afterward."
Peyton had a cancer-related stroke in 1991, and doctors told his wife to gather the family together.
"Four days later, he walked out of the hospital, and we went to eat at the Olive Garden [in Roanoke]," she said. "He was singing again that Sunday."
The Southern Statesman performed several times at the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, where Jerry Falwell is minister. Falwell remembered Peyton in his sermon Sunday, and said Tuesday: "I am glad to have known him as a personal friend."
Barbara Peyton is writing a book about her husband's life. She thought she had it finished some time ago, but said Bill Peyton "kept getting up and touching people's lives."
Barbara Peyton also will continue as host of a gospel singing program she and her husband started about three years ago on WEFC-TV (Channel 38).
"I received a piece of mail that said Bill's love was contagious," she said. "And it was."
by CNB