Robert V. Graham was born in El Dorado, Kansas on September 5, 1912, one of six children born to Ora and Catherine “Kate” Peterman Graham.  The family lived at 1137 West Central.  His siblings were Ira, Mabel, Mildred, Ralph, and Paul.

Following high school, Robert hoped to attend the Curtis Institute of Music at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for advanced training.  The foremost school of its kind in the world, connected with the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company, its purpose was to provide opportunity to those with the ability to go far in music who were handicapped by the lack of funds.

He got his opportunity to audition for a scholarship at the school with funds raised by a local benefit performance of an opera he had written during high school.

Upon arriving in Philadelphia, he learned that the Curtis Institute had temporarily closed due to the recent death of its founder.  He was advised to go to Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, with its greater opportunities for training in composition.

Awarded a scholarship, he attended Eastman from 1933 to 1936, working in the girls’ dining hall and coping music for the Sibley Library for money to live on.  He also worked as an accompanist there for several years.  He dropped out after three years to teach privately.

Through attending Eastman, he met and married Jeana Ardath Black in 1936 in Albion, New York.  Jeana was a 1937 graduate of Eastman.  A gifted poet, over the following years she provided the lyrical settings for a sizeable segment of her husband’s musical works.  The couple had five sons: Robin, Ross, Thad, Paul and Jerad.

Graham moved to Wichita in 1942, to take a job in a war plant in Wichita during World War II.  He entered the U.S. Army in 1944, where he served as an assistant to Chaplain Willi Frey in Camp Hood, Texas and later with the Army of Occupation, Eighth Army Headquarters in Yokohama, Japan.  Frey had been a concertmaster of the Houston Symphony Orchestra.

When opportunity arose for Robert to fly home at the end of his tour of duty, he turned it down in favor of a month-long sea voyage.  As it turned out, the plane he would have flown in plowed into a mountainside, killing everyone on board.

He was discharged in 1947, and returned to Rochester, New York.  He spent part of 1950 at Mount McGregor Sanitarium in New York, undergoing a major operation for a lung ailment.  After several years of study interrupted by periods of hospitalization, he received the degree of Bachelor of Music with Distinction from the Eastman School of Music in 1950.

The Graham family then took a camping trip across the country, moving from New York to Redlands, California, where Robert received the Master of Music (in Composition) degree one year later from the University of Redlands.

From 1952 to 1954, Graham worked as a missionary teacher at St. Margaret’s Episcopal in Tokyo.  One of the family’s friends in Tokyo was Rev. Christopher Morley, Jr., son of the famed writer-editor of the same name.

Returning to California in 1954, Graham was a piano and organ teacher for private students, and church organist for St. Paul’s Episcopal in Pomona, California. Robert continued work for the overseas missions of the Protestant Episcopal church, making a lecture tour, and acting as liaison between American and Japanese music publishing houses.

In 1956, he was again a hospital patient, at Long Beach Veterans Hospital, suffering from a lung condition.  After six months in Long Beach, the family moved to Tucson, Arizona where he spent time recuperating from the long siege of hospitalization.  This, he stated, was a blessing in disguise, for he was able to devote all his time to composition.

In 1961, the family moved to Waianae, Hawaii.  Later, they moved to Escondido, California, where Graham continued to compose music and travel to judge music contests in the southwestern states.

Around 1951, he was elected to become a member of Pi Kappa Lamba, an honorary music society.  Robert Graham died on December 9, 1992 in San Diego, California.