If you haven't heard much from LDS composer Janice Kapp Perry as of late, she really hasn't fallen off the radar.

She has simply risen to a new challenge.

She has started what the Protestants would call a "music ministry." She is taking her songs to the Spanish-speaking Latter-day Saints.

I dropped in on one of her "charla foganeras" (firesides) recently. I left with my batteries well charged.

She is a woman with a vocation for the work.

Her husband, Douglas, began with an eloquent — and elegant — introduction, comparing Hispanic immigrants to the Monarch butterflies that leave Mexico each year and migrate north. The butterflies that eventually return to Mexico are the fifth generation. He wondered if that would be true of the people as well.

Then Sister Perry took the microphone and spoke in strong, clean Spanish. She had just returned from a mission to Chile.

Learning a foreign language is like learning to swim. You can read all the books in the world, but at some point you've got to get in and paddle. And Janice Kapp Perry moved through Spanish with bold, confident strokes.

Not everyone was even sure who she was. Inspirational songs like "Sisters in Zion" and "I'm Trying to Be Like Jesus" have made her something of a regional celebrity to English speakers. Spanish speakers know the tunes, they just don't know the tunesmith. But when she began singing "A Child's Prayer" in Spanish, lights ignited all over the room.

After that, she had them in the hollow of her hand.

During one rhythmic ditty, her husband even "busted some moves" — looking for all the world like a conga dancer in search of a line. She shook her head.

"Tengo mi propio payaso," she said. (I have my very own clown.)

The audience ate it up.

Afterward, she stayed in the hall until the last autograph was signed and the last photograph was taken.

I waited, too, and walked with her to her car.

I asked if she and Sen. Orrin Hatch were working on some new songs. She said they had been in touch but that her heart was with the Spanish-speaking people for now.

That was obvious.

She'd just driven 150 miles round-trip on a treacherous winter night to brighten a few lives in Box Elder County.

She gave me copies of her five Spanish CDs. She said there would be more to come.

Later, I was reading through her book, "Songs From My Heart," and was struck by a line there.

"I am constantly amazed at the power of music to heal, comfort and inspire in so many diverse and unusual circumstances," she writes.

That evening had been a diverse and unusual circumstance.

And yet, when I think about it now, it's not the music of Janice Kapp Perry that comes to mind, but that old "plunk-a-plunk" song that young kids learn to pick out on the piano with one finger — "Heart and Soul."

That's how she works.

She throws herself headlong into the venture — whether it was learning Spanish, writing music or — in her latest "ministry" — looking for ways to "heal, comfort and inspire" flocks of migrating butterflies.

---

E-mail: jerjohn@desnews.com