Murray M. Harris returned in 1894 from his Boston apprenticeship with organ builder George S. Hutchings to a booming Los Angeles where only eight pipe organs existed. Six years later, Los Angeles would have 154 churches in it and scores of new pipe organs, many of them built by Harris. Harris and Henry C. Fletcher became business partners and founded the city’s first organ building firm, Fletcher & Harris. From this beginning more than 100 organs were built by 1913, including the world’s largest for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, and that would become Philadelphia’s famous Wanamaker Organ.

David Lennox Smith (d. 1979) carefully gathered the history of Harris and his contemporaries and Orpha Ochse has updated Smith’s research with the help of colleagues Manuel Rosales, Kevin Gilchrist, Jim Lewis, and Jack Bethards to include an annotated opus list, listings of organ builders from the Los Angeles City Directories, many stoplists and photographs, and technical details.

344 pages, hardbound