Celebrating the life of
Carver William Blanchard
March 30, 1942 - October 15, 2026
Carver Blanchard passed away peacefully with the assistance of regular visits from Hospice Savannah. Carver was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1942 to Carver Blanchard and Dorothy Coquille Blanchard. His twin sister Nova Thrifley passed away a year ago, and he is survived by his brother Paul Blanchard of New York City.
Carver was encouraged in tennis and in music by his father, who directed a boys’ choir. An outstanding tennis player in his youth, Carver was nationally ranked in Junior Tennis and number one in Junior Tennis in Louisiana at age fifteen. He went to Northwestern University on a tennis scholarship where he majored in music, and later attended Juilliard School of Music.
After college he enlisted in the Air Force where he was selected as a singer with the Singing Sergeants. He enjoyed singing on the Capitol steps and traveling to countries around the world singing tenor with the Air Force Band. After his four years of service he remained in Alexandria, VA, where he taught guitar and learned to play the lute. He became the lutenist for the Smithsonian Institution where he enjoyed sitting in the Italian Renaissance exhibit playing Baroch music for visitors.
Carver taught music at Wesleyan University in Connecticut for many years, teaching students guitar and lute. He established Carver’s Barn, an Arts Center in Elka Park, New York, which attracted many audiences for plays and musical performances. Carver was known as a musician, performer and composer, as well as author of several one-act plays, all performed at Carver’s Barn.
The lute is traditionally a Renaissance instrument used to entertain audiences by playing early music, but Carver Blanchard changed all that with his renditions of popular music and rock and roll on the lute. His first album “Lute Unleashed” is still available at Albany Records, and includes songs from Stephen Foster to a variety of American classics.
Carver began coming to Savannah when he met Emmeline and Robert Cooper, who welcomed him and always provided him with a place to stay. Carver performed on a lute made by Robert Cooper in his workshop. He loved coming to Savannah, and spent the last five years of his life living at White bluff on the Vernon River with Laura Lawton. He enjoyed performing at the Learning Center and visiting Dr. Chris Chandler’s music appreciation class at Savannah State University. He loved it that Celia Howell convinced him to play every Tuesday morning at the Oaks at the Marshes of Skidaway Island, where he went from room to room singing and playing the guitar or lute up until a few weeks before he passed away.
My sincere condolences to all Carver's family. I knew Carver, his brother Paul, their sister Nova, and their parents Dotty and big Carver. They were all exceptionally fine people whom it was very good to know. I am sorry that young Carver had to suffer with illness in the last years of his life. He was such a good fellow. - Joe Stahl
- Joseph B. STAHL, New Orleans, LA
My husband David and I were attending an open-air play in the Catskills when we became obsessed with Carver, who was strolling around the stage in a straw hat and seersucker suit, playing the lute and singing Softly and Tenderly, a hymn I had never heard before and couldn't get out of my head for weeks. I spotted him on the deck of a house as we were leaving and went up to tell him about the ear worm he had left us with. We chatted a bit and then he said we'd better come up on the deck and have some of the fantastic wine his brother Paul had just given him. That led to dinner at our country house the next weekend and began a great friendship of many decades, many fantastic dinners, and many residences on both our parts. Carver was looking for a country place and just a couple of weeks after we met, we saw one we thought would be perfect - Carver's Barn. There you could hear Metropolitan Opera chorus singers among the pine trees, see plays and talk with neighbors you neger knew you had, and there our daughter got married in a clearing Carver had discovered a few months earlier, known to the historic owners of the place as The Heart. Above all else, Carver loved to put on a show., and did it brilliantly. And always with lots of heart. One of his most stunning creations came from discovering an old wooden chapel in a former summer community on a mountaintop in the Catskills. It hadn't been used in many years, but Carver was taken not only with its beauty but with its acoustics. He got permission to clear it out and clean it up, found pews and chairs somewhere and convinced a handful of musician friends to come and give a concert one Sunday afternoon. It was completely magical, so simple and so haunting a setting, such ravishing music, and the all wooden church with its high rafters echoed the music back into your bones. And that was it , just a couple of amazing hours, no further plans, no money exchanging hands, just a simply great thing to do that he managed to bring to life. He was a completely original person, highly intelligent like the rest of his family, and blessed with enormous energy, curiosity, and humor. He could explain in detail some obscure piece of music, go for a run, and end up at the Waffle House, where he loved to eavesdrop and return with terrific stories. There was always some fantastic bit of music he'd unearthed somewhere that you had to hear, a big project like a writer's colony in the Catskills that he came really close to animating. It's almost impossible to explain the force of a person like that, and my heart goes out to Paul and Laura, who spent those last happy years in Savannah with him and know him best.
- Fran McCullough, Hillsborough, NC
Services under the direction of:
Fox & Weeks Funeral Directors, Hodgson Chapel
912-352-7200
