Dan N. Pressley

Dan N. Pressley, age 93, passed away on February 24, 2024 in Wilmington, Delaware. He was Artist/Teacher of Singing on the University of Delaware faculty from the 1970s into 1990s, where he was also director of opera productions. With his wife, pianist Nancy Gamble Pressley, he ran a private voice studio for decades, lasting into the 2010s.

Dan sang lead opera and oratorio roles; he performed with the Detroit Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Atlanta, St. Louis, and Delaware Symphony Orchestras, among others. With Nancy he performed in much of the U.S. and in Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, France, and Italy.

Born 1931 in Gastonia, North Carolina, the only child of Clyde and Zilpha Pressley, Dan grew up in Charleston and began singing in high school. The Gaston Music Education Foundation cites its 1950 support of Dan’s “immense talent” as the organization’s beginnings, creating a scholarship to send him to Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory.

After boot camp at Fort Jackson, South Carolina in 1952, Dan performed with the U.S. Army’s Special Services, touring as Pfc. Alvin Hawkins in the musical comedy “At War with the Army.” He performed in Roanoke Island’s outdoor historical drama “The Lost Colony” when Andy Griffith was in the cast, studied at the Brevard Music Center, then earned degrees in singing and opera from the University of Michigan, where he was a featured soloist with the Glee Club during its first European tour in 1955.

In the late 1950s Dan worked in New York City and then as an opener in Las Vegas; in 1959 he sang on tour with bandleader Fred Waring and The Pennsylvanians. In the 1960s he taught voice at Hillsdale College, where he co-ran a summertime outdoor musical theater festival. Dan conducted and taught voice at Midwestern University in Wichita Falls, Texas and then at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, where he led the music department’s chorus on a European tour.

In 1977 Dan and Nancy performed in concert at Carnegie Hall, and in 1978 they performed at England’s Aldeburgh Festival, founded by composer Benjamin Britten and singer Peter Pears, where they studied Britten’s works with Pears. In the 1990s, Dan’s and Nancy’s studio led to summer seasons of the East Coast Opera Company performing in Delaware and in Kennebunkport, Maine. Singers from the Pressley family voice studio have had international concert and opera careers.

Dan also sang with and directed church music groups for much of his life, working as a soloist at New York City’s Brick Presbyterian Church in the 1950s and in later years working closely at Wilmington’s Concord Presbyterian Church with Nancy and with their son Matthew, Concord’s Minister of Music.

Dan was a gregarious storyteller, a dapper dresser, an enthusiastic athlete, a wily card player and a lifelong Michigan man. His appetite for travel led him across the country multiple times, as well as to Cuba and Africa; as a young man he ran a travel agency for several years. An avid golfer, Dan played courses from Scotland to Hawaii, and he briefly coached the golf team while also teaching music at Hillsdale College.

Dan is survived by his wife of 63 years, Nancy, along with children Karen, Nelson, Christopher, and Matthew, and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to the Gaston Music Education Foundation (history link http://gmef.org/history.html).