Robert Lewis Johnson

1915 - 1999

Robert Johnson, a first tenor in the Voice of Prophecy Quartet, the Kings’ Heralds, sang with the quartet from 1939 to 1941, before the radio program was first broadcast nationally in 1942.

Robert was born in Mexico City, Mexico, the older of two children and the only son of Ernest Roy and Irma Edna Lewis Johnson, missionaries to Central America. His mother, daughter of Charles C. Lewis, president of Walla Walla College, now University, and then Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska, had taught music in her last year as a student in the music program at Union College.

She taught at San Fernando Academy in California from 1910 to 1913 and then married Ernest Johnson. Robert’s childhood was spent in both Mexico and the Canal Zone, before his parents settled in Southern California and Arizona, where she was chair of the music department and taught voice and piano at Arizona Academy in Phoenix from 1927 to 1933.

Johnson married Muriel Annice Morton, a 1935 graduate of Lodi Academy, in the late 1930s and in the 1940 census he and his wife, along Wesley Crane and Vernon Stewart and their wives were listed as residing at Adventist Academy in Phoenix, Arizona, all three men being listed as evangelistic singers. At that time, they were members of the VOP King’s Heralds Quartet, and the fourth member, Ray Turner, was listed as a radio evangelist in nearby Maricopa County along with Harold M. Richards, minister.

The Johnsons were living in Napa, California, when she died on Christmas Day in 1993 at age 75. He was living in San Luis Obispo at the time of his death six years later, at age 84.

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Source: Information provided by Kenneth Mattson, January 2013; Social security Death Index; 1920 and 1940 U.S. Federal Census; Obituaries for Irma Edna Lewis Johnson, Review and Herald, 27 November 1975, 23 and Ernest Roy Johnson, R and H, 14 July 1977 (the daughter’s name was Elaine Louise Johnson Waller); Educational Messenger, 1 May 1907, 15 and 15 June 1907, 40; Pacific Union Recorder, 4 August 1910, 1,2 and 10 August , 6.