When a college closes—and at least 84 public and private colleges across the United States have either closed or merged since March 2020, with more expected to come—the focus tends to land on lasts. At Birmingham-Southern College, which closed in May 2024 after 168 years, that meant focusing on the last graduation; the last chime of the campus bell signaling the last day of class; the last time to see the leaves on the ginkgo trees turn glorious gold; the last win of a storied baseball program.
But for more than 70 BSC graduates, the focus is on what’s next.
Forward, Ever—Always: BSC’s 89th Service of Lessons and Carols, is set for Friday, December 5, at 7 p.m. at Canterbury United Methodist Church in Mountain Brook. The service, which is free and open to the public, will also air on Alabama Public Television on Monday, December 22, at 8 p.m.
Thomas Waters of Hoover, a 1985 BSC graduate and the son, brother, husband, father and father-in-law of fellow BSC alumni, has organized the service. “This experience means the world to my family and to the BSC family, but it’s also meaningful to the community, especially now,” Waters says.
Holiday services by BSC student choirs began in the mid-1930s under the late BSC music professor Raymond Anderson, continuing yearly other than with brief interruptions for World War II and the 2020 pandemic. With no student choir remaining after the college’s closing in 2024, it seemed that the 2023 service would have been the last. Unwilling to relinquish one of the BSC family’s most cherished traditions, the alumni group rehearsed weekly in person and via livestream to learn, re-learn and polish a program selected from the College’s vast music library.
The 2025 service will be conducted by Dr. James Bagwell, BSC Class of 1988, an internationally renowned choral and orchestra conductor and a professor of music at Bard College in New Yorks’s Hudson Valley. Neurologist and longtime choir member Dr. Thomas C. Head of Mountain Brook, BSC Class of 1985, has served as rehearsal conductor, accompanied by Richard Charles Phillips of Vestavia Hills, BSC Class of 1981, choirmaster and organist at Highlands United Methodist Church. The 2025 choir includes singers from seven decades of class years—the 1960s through the year of BSC’s closure—from Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and even New Jersey.
