June 5, 2015

Finding his voice: UW aphasia expert’s work with country musician Billy Mize featured in film

Country musician Billy Mize worked with great people in his long career — Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Buck Owens, Glen Campbell and many more.

He also worked in a different way with Diane Kendall, now a University of Washington professor of speech and hearing sciences and director of the UW’s Aphasia Research Laboratory. Aphasia is an acquired communication disorder that impairs a person’s ability to process language but does not affect intelligence or cognition.

Kendall’s work helping Mize regain his speech and singing after a stroke is now featured in a documentary about the musician and his times, “Billy Mize and the Bakersfield Sound,” directed by Joe Saunders, the singer’s grandson.

The 2014 film will be shown at 7 p.m. Tuesday, June 9, at Seattle’s Central Cinema, sponsored by the Aphasia Lab. Tickets are $9.

Mize was 59 and already retired from performing when a stroke impaired his ability to speak and sing. Kendall treated him several years later in 2003 when she was a faculty member at the University of Florida and also worked at the VA Brain Rehabilitation Research Center.

The therapy enabled Mize to once again speak and sing with family and friends. The film shows him both before and after the treatment. Mize now lives independently and away from the spotlight in northern California.

“Billy’s disorder is one of language and motor speech production, which rendered him unable to speak clearly,” Kendall said. “The treatment is rebuilding sounds and sound structures in the brain, one sound at a time — all consonants and all vowels — and put them together. You remap and reorganize all sounds, and then you combine those sounds into words.”

Music was involved, too, she said, though music is not usually part of the aphasia lab’s therapy regime: “He brought his guitar along, so when we started building words, we would do words that he remembered from lyrics.”

The Bakersfield Sound explored in the film came from those who traveled to that small California oil town during the Depression, as Mize’s family did, bringing along the musical styles of their home states. A New York Times article called the sound “a reaction to the polished and lifeless tunes coming out of Nashville … more stripped down, a little louder, abetted by the punch of electric guitars and the sway and lurch of rockabilly.”

Publicity notes for the film state: “This fusion gave birth to an exciting, raw-edged style of country music. This was the birthplace of the Bakersfield Sound, and one of its founding members was Billy Mize.”

Saunders, the film’s director, had high praise for Kendall and her work.
“Her patience and dedication during her work with Billy allowed my family to share our most cherished collective memory of my grandfather,” he wrote in an email. “Watching him sing for the first time in 20 years was a truly priceless moment. It moved me so much I built a documentary around it.”

Kendall, who also works for the Puget Sound Veteran’s Administration health care system, said a VA-funded research project is now underway based on the same treatment Mize received, involving 80 patients from Seattle to Portland.

“The seed of this line of research was planted at the University of Florida, but it has grown and prospered at the University of Washington,” she said.

Kendall said she enjoyed the filming process, “and being exposed to all the country music artists,” but she was equally proud that the work of the Aphasia Lab was being highlighted.

“The joy I felt in working with Billy is the exact same joy I feel about working with everyone, and everyone has their own goals,” she said. “Billy’s goal was singing, but a mother’s goal might be talking to her 2-year-old. So the goals are person-specific, and when we achieve those goals, it’s the same level of joy, regardless.”

Watch a preview for the documentary: