Musical Pipes

Keeping the Barton organ running

by Jeff Mortimer

posted 8/7/2011

"It's just like a high-mileage car," Scott Smith says of the Michigan Theater's Barton organ. "It runs well but it needs constant attention." At nearly eighty-four years old, the organ is played five times a week, fifty-two weeks a year, probably more than any other such instrument in Ann Arbor. Smith and his assistant, Joe Granger, of Scott Smith Pipe Organs in Lansing, are the ones who keep it running.

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