Nov 5, 2013

David Olson comforted mourners at many a funeral with songs like “Danny Boy,” using the bagpipes that had fascinated him since he was a student at Rostraver High School in Pricedale a half-century ago.

They will now be played at Olson’s own farewell. The resident of Belle Vernon, who was well-known in Washington County both for his distinctive playing of the Scottish Highland pipes and his time as an art instructor at Washington & Jefferson College and California University of Pennsylvania, died Sunday of an apparent heart attack. He was 69.

Olson died not long after playing a postlude during the Heritage Sunday worship service at Church of the Covenant in Washington. Attempts to revive him at the church were not successful and he was pronounced dead at Washington Hospital shortly thereafter.

He enjoyed everything about playing the bagpipes, said his son, Alan Olson. “He enjoyed the instrument itself. He enjoyed the joy it brought to people.”

Olson’s interest in the bagpipes was stoked by a high school classmate who was trying to master the notoriously complicated instrument. A trombone player in Rostraver’s concert and marching bands, Olson paid $25 for a set of bagpipes made in Pakistan and began learning the musical scales on a practice chanter, an instrument that’s not unlike a recorder.

“You have to work your way through it,” he told the Observer-Reporter in 2007. “My family was really not thrilled that I was learning how to play … usually they would try to get away from it” when Olson made his way through the squeaks and grunts that are part of the bagpipe learning curve.

What did he love about the bagpipes? “I love the sound,” Olson said. “It’s a very eerie, a very plaintive sound.”

He went on to the play with Clan Grant, a Donora pipe band, and was a longtime member of the Macdonald Pipe Band in Bethel Park. Bob Blachley, another member of the ensemble, took bagpipe lessons from Olson in 1980 and remembers him as “a good musician all the way around. He was pretty talented.”

Along with playing bagpipes around the region, Olson donned the tartan and played them in Scotland and, a couple of months after 9/11, undertook a solitary march around the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center in New York with bagpipes in hand. When he passed by a policeman, he began “Amazing Grace,” and it brought the officer to tears.

“The tears just ran down his face,” Olson said.

He maintained a sculpture studio in downtown Washington and would sometimes practice the pipes when things were slow. More recently, Olson taught classes on blacksmithing, ceramics, music and metalsmithing at the Touchstone Center for Crafts in Farmington, Fayette County.

Survivors include his son, a brother and a sister. Visitation will be from 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday and 2 to 4 p.m. and 7 to 9 p.m. Friday in Ferguson Funeral Home, Belle Vernon, where a funeral will be at 11 a.m. Saturday, November 9.

“He lived life, I’ll tell you that,” Blachley said.