She moved away from her hometown decades ago, but continues the family music tradition, composing choral and vocal music, after retiring from 20 years as an elementary school music teacher and choral director. And she’s never forgotten her family roots.

“When we were kids, we used to sing at our church, Grace Lutheran,” she said. “Martha is still a member there, in the choir and bell choir. We were billed as The Johnson Girls and dad would write arrangements for us.”

When they vacationed, she added, “the six of us would be in dad’s station wagon singing pieces in four-part harmony. Donna and I sang alto, mom and Martha soprano, Karen tenor and dad would sing bass.”

Of the six, only the two youngest survive – Joan, of West Babylon, New York, and Martha McColley Kersbergen, of Fort Dodge.

On Feb. 13, their mother Gladys Johnson Meier, an accomplished musician and singer who was highly regarded as a registered nurse, died at Friendship Haven.

Their father was one of Fort Dodge’s most famous entertainment figures — Richard “Dick” Johnson, an avid barbershopper who was beloved for his 1960s local television show “Uncle Dick’s Fun House” that put smiles on the faces of hundreds of Fort Dodge girls and boys during its six-year run on KQTV. He died in Montana in 2024 at age 95. Karen was 64 when she died in 2015 of ovarian cancer and Donna was 68 when she passed away in 2020 of complications following surgery.

“There is nothing closer to the soul than the sound of the human voice singing” are words Joan believes in. She lives in West Babylon with her husband, Billy, a professional saxophone player in the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra that performs weekly at the Village Vanguard in New York City. She has been active in the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) and recently returned from a four-day conference in Dallas that was attended “by 3,000 choral geeks, conductors, performers, ensembles and composers from all around the world.  I enjoyed every moment.”

In addition to her studies at New York University and The Juilliard School, she holds a bachelor of music degree from Berklee College of Music in Boston and a master of science in education from Hofstra University in Nassau County, N.Y.

Drewes has toured with jazz ensembles in Europe and on the East Coast and recorded several albums which included her original compositions and vocals. Her choral compositions (“Tacit”, “Three,” “Lift My Soul” and “The Star”) were premiered under the baton of David Fryling, national president of the ACDA and director of choral activities at Hofstra University.

“Lift My Soul” and “Distant Murmurings” were accepted into the prestigious PROJECT: ENCORE Catalogue. Her compositions have been performed by the Evergreen and Oak Trio in conjunction with the Iowa Composer Forum. She won first prize in the 2024 Choral Series Composition Competition at Mount Holyoke College and received Honorable Mention for her piece “Lift My Soul” in the 2022 HerVoice Composers Competition.

Fryling said, “Joan’s music is a delight to sing and a joy to conduct. Her musical language is sophisticated yet accessible, she treats her texts with great care, and her approach to the voice is effortlessly idiomatic.”

She worked for 20 years at Saltzman East Memorial School in Farmingdale, New York, where she taught general music and choruses for students in kindergarten through fifth grade.

Joan and Billy have two daughters — Grace, who works for Google and lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is married to Chris Scheben, and Amalia, who is a visual artist, works for a traveling Native American museum and lives in West Babylon, New York.

“Both sang and played instruments through high school, and were involved in choir, orchestra and musicals,” Drewes said.

Drewes credits “an amazing music department” at Fort Dodge Senior High School for forming her music foundation — particularly Larry Mitchell in choir, John Groethe in jazz band and James Huffman in orchestra. She was the first female president of the FDSH a cappella choir. Barbara Rector was her piano teacher in Fort Dodge until her junior year.

“I always felt (and I still do to this day) that the Iowa work ethic, the commitment to values and having community support, were all foundational forces to my success,” she said. ”Dad and I had many parallel talents. He conducted choirs, so did I. He was a composer/arranger, so am I. I’m grateful for the gifts passed on to me.”

All four Johnson girls graduated from FDSH. Karen excelled in dance and Donna is still remembered for playing the role of Dolly in the high school’s musical “Hello Dolly,” a performance that set the stage for a life that took her to show business work in New York City, London and Minneapolis.

“I was in ninth grade when Donna did Dolly. I think it worked in my favor, there were certain expectations, oh, you’re Karen and Donna’s sister. Luckily, I had the talent to meet those expectations.”

“When Martha got married, Karen, Donna and I were living in New York City and as a wedding present, I wrote an arrangement for us to sing at her wedding. Karen sang tenor, Donna alto and I sang soprano. Our dad was completely blown away by my arrangement. That meant the world to me. We did it in a barbershop way and that was his genre.

“I was a normal classmate until someone realized I was the daughter of Uncle Dick. It gave me a sense of notoriety and also a sense of responsibility – don’t do anything stupid! Not only my dad, but to follow in the footsteps of Karen and Donna — well, they were not easy acts to follow.

“Dad used to write arrangements of hymns for the Johnson Girls to sing in church. Martha was too young to join us – but Karen, Donna and I sang beautifully together – we thought we were identical to ‘The Lennon Sisters’. Our house had a huge backyard. We put on plays, acrobatic acts on the swing set, and one year made a parade around the neighborhood and invited neighbors to come watch us perform. Donna made a stage of an old door supported by cinder blocks.  Yeah — the whole lot of us, born to perform!  Mom played piano and sang, but she was a nurse so if anything happened to any of the neighborhood kids, we brought them home to Mom for ‘fixing’ — mostly the application of Band-Aids.” 

Drewes graduated from FDSH in 1973 and received a music scholarship to attend Morningside College in Sioux City — “but it wasn’t a good fit.”

Her sisters Karen and Donna were living in New York City at the time, and she was accepted at Berklee College of Music in Boston where she was a composition major and sang in a traveling ensemble.

 ”Donna had already forged a path by going to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in NYC, so me going to Boston was doable,” she said.

Karen worked in New York City as a legal secretary.

“The legacy of my mom is that she never clipped our wings,” Drewes said, “She never discouraged us from going where our talents would take us. It was never no, that’s dumb, too far, too expensive, not a good career. When I said I wanted to go to Boston, she said fine – it will either make you or break you.”

Her mother Gladys (Pauline Wilson) was raised and educated in Harcourt and graduated in 1949 from St. Joseph’s Mercy Hospital School of Nursing in Fort Dodge. She worked as an R.N. at Iowa Methodist Hospital in Des Moines and provided private duty nursing in Sac City and Carroll before marrying Richard “Dick” Johnson in 1950.

The couple lived in Emmetsburg and Carroll before establishing their home in Fort Dodge. She put her career on hold for 14 years, raising their four daughters, and returned to nursing in 1965. In 1968 Gladys was a charter member of the opening of the Intensive Care Unit at Lutheran Hospital (now UnityPoint Health — Trinity Regional Medical Center.) She immersed herself in studying coronary heart disease and attended lectures, symposiums and workshops for nursing in these critical care arenas. In 1975 she taught courses on electro-cardiology at Iowa Central Community College. She and Johnson divorced in 1970, and in 1976 she married L. Lester Meier and the couple lived in Fort Dodge.

Gladys traveled to the jungles of eastern Honduras in 1988-91 to assist in conducting health clinics and hands-on nursing for the people along the Patuca River. She was a self-made speaker who gave community talks on her trips to Honduras, the Iowa Corn Show and Heart-Health. She left hospital nursing in 1975 and worked for Webster County Public Health as a public health nurse, retiring in 1991.

Martha remembers her mother for her stage presence when speaking in nursing classes or about her experiences in Honduras. And for her wisdom.

“I remember she would always say — ‘You have two choices in life, to laugh or to cry. If you choose to cry, you’re going to have a miserable life. But if you learn to laugh at yourself, you’ll have a great life.'”

Martha and her first husband, Jim McColley, started a cleaning business in 1982 — “we started up with a bucket of cleaning supplies and a vacuum, and five accounts,” she said with a laugh. Clean All Inc. was incorporated in 1984 and at the time of its sale to her best friend and 10-year employee Robin Smith, in 2022, it had 20 employees and five vans.

“I sold it so I could retire and take care of my grandkids,” she said. She and Bob Kersbergen were married in 2014.

She and McColley have four children: Rose, like her grandmother a registered nurse, working in an Orlando, Florida, emergency center; Scott, who has Downs Syndrome and lives at a house staffed by One Vision in Fort Dodge and works at Applebee’s; Rachel, who has lived and worked in the Des Moines area the last 12 years as a tattoo artist and recently purchased a home in Slater with her fiance as they are expecting a baby in September, and Matthew, a paramedic at the Humboldt County Memorial Hospital.

As with Joan’s family, the Johnson Family music gene is implanted in Martha’s family as well. Martha sings in the Grace Lutheran choir and plays in the bell choir, and while she no longer does musicals, she performs in plays at the Hawkeye Community Theater and helps with sets and props.

Matthew has returned to performing at HCT. Martha said, “His goal is to win the Best Actor award and have his name on the board in the lobby with his Mom and Aunt Donna! He accomplished this on his second play ‘CAHOOTS’ written by Rick Johnston, as the character Al Shields.”

And, she said, Scott “thinks he is a rock star, can’t carry a tune in a bucket, has serious pitch issues…he not only posts his masterpieces on Facebook but goes out with his guitar to the mausoleum at North Lawn Cemetery where Karen and Donna are interred and sings a song he wrote for Aunt Karen and Aunt Donna.”