Tom Wisner, Chesapeake folk singer, dies at 79

When Tom Wisner sang or wrote about the Chesapeake Bay, a task he dedicated his life to doing, he always tried to capture the voice of the water and the sky, of the rocks and the trees, of the fish and the birds, of the gods of nature he believed still watched over it all.

The "Bard of the Chesapeake Bay," whose music was recorded by the Smithsonian Institution and used in a National Geographic documentary, died of lung cancer Friday at the Burnett-Calvert Hospice House in Prince Frederick, Md. He was 79.

Wisner was born June 29, 1930, in Washington, D.C. Most summers, he and his mother would visit her family's farm in the upper James River basin in Virginia. They spent hours sitting on the front porch, singing country songs.

Wisner was an Air Force veteran of the Korean War, then earned his bachelor's degree in biology from Hartwick College in upstate New York. He did graduate work in ecology at Cornell University, studying the migration patterns of swans and geese, but grew bored.

He worked as a naturalist in Sequoia National Park in California, then moved to Southern Maryland to be a high school science teacher.

In the mid-1960s, he took a job as an educator at the University of Maryland's Chesapeake Biological Laboratory in Solomons, where he began writing and singing.

Wisner's job at the lab was to help the scientists and environmentalists explain their findings and their worries about the health of the watershed. But he soon found that people related better to art and music.

"It was too cognitive and too tight-lipped," Wisner said. "They have the revelation, but they can't relate to the culture."

Soon after joining the lab, Wisner began composing. One of his better-known songs, "Chesapeake Born," was written while he lived in the lab's dormitory.

Over the years, Wisner recorded several albums, including one with his son Mark and several with Maryland schoolchildren. Wisner worked with groups of children who visited the lab and, years later, he decorated his home with their artwork of children pretending to be crabs, sea gulls or other bay creatures.

Soon after learning he had lung cancer in late 2008, he and a group of students recorded "The Land, Maryland." Survivors include four children and seven grandchildren.

Wisner also became good friends with Maryland political figures, urging them to pass laws to protect the bay. Anytime he spotted Gov. Martin O'Malley at events, Wisner would make the governor come on stage and sing with him.

"His life's work and his life's hope was to bring about a new era in our relationship to the land and the waters of the bay," O'Malley said in a statement.