Longtime friend and former Music & the Spoken Word announcer J. Spencer Kinard has retired after 32 years of service with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir organization. Kinard has served as a Sunday morning host since the concept of having a host address the audience was inaugurated in the fall of 2002.  Kinard, Duane Cardall, Mark Eubank, and Kent Norton were the initial four hosts and Ruth Todd has also served as a host. With Kinard’s departure to serve an LDS mission with his wife in Washington, DC, an interesting new hosting arrangement will be made to fill his shoes. Watch for a future blog with this announcement.

Kinard took over as the announcer of Music & the Spoken Word in February 1972, replacing Richard L. Evans, who began in 1929 as the shows original announcer. While fulfilling his weekly duties as announcer, Kinard was a reporter turned news director at KSL Television in Salt Lake City, UT.

Kinard recalled auditioning for Music & the Spoken Word saying, “President Harold B. Lee later told me that everyone on the committee was asked to write down the name of the individual they thought was the right person for the role. He said there was only one name on everyone's list -- mine. I was humbled by that and felt there was some divine influence telling me that that was what I was supposed to do.”

Watch this 1979 video of J. Spencer Kinard introducing former Choir director J. Spencer Cornwall at the 50th Radio Broadcast Anniversary Reunion, where Cornwall conducted his arrangement of “Come, Come Ye Saints.”