Utahn's noted for great notes

When approached for a feature story interview, Janice Kapp Perry was a little puzzled by the attention, just as friends had predicted. The best thing about Janice Perry, they had said, is that she doesn't know she's Janice Perry. Which is why Perry wonders why anyone would want to do a story about her.

"I might be the most ordinary person you have ever met," she warns the reporter. "I hope there is a story in there somewhere."

She's the most ordinary person you ever met if ordinary is someone who has written and recorded close to 900 songs and 60 albums, as well two musicals and nine cantatas — and she didn't start writing until she was 38.

This quiet, mild 66-year-old woman is a songwriting machine who turned a hobby into a family business.

And yet she has hardly touched the piano in the past two decades except to find the notes for her compositions because of the onset of a painful, mysterious paralysis in her left hand.

Janice Perry is so ordinary that she's a household name to 12 million members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her husband/manager Doug doesn't exaggerate when he says, "You can go to any Primary or Young Women's (church) meeting anywhere in the world on any Sunday and hear her music."

The LDS Church has published 10 of her songs in its children's Primary songbook, as well as one in the church's hymn book. The church once conducted an informal survey, asking people to name their favorite children's songs. Four of the top seven were Perry's, and two more made the top 20.

"She is part of the culture," says Craig Jessop, director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, whose ranks once included Perry. "She has touched more lives of the LDS Church than any living LDS composer."

Her songs have been sung and recorded by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and performed by the Mormon Youth Symphony and Choir on Temple Square. One of her songs, "Everyday Heroes," which she co-wrote with Sen. Orrin Hatch, was recorded by Brooks & Dunn on the 2002 Winter Games Olympic CD, and 8,000 high school students sang the song at the Washington Monument last year.

"Heal Our Land," another Hatch-Perry song, was sung by gospel singer Wintley Phipps at the National Prayer Breakfast and at a concert in Washington in advance of President Bush's inauguration. "Jesus' Love Is Like a River" was sung by Gladys Knight and has been performed widely outside the LDS Church.

"She's filled the world with her music," says Michael Moody, the LDS Church music chairman.

Before the music came along, there was an athletic career that lasted well into middle age, and there were children. Lots of them. She's got more kids calling her Mom than Carol Brady, with four of her own and 11 foster children.