Wanted to thank rbistolfi for downloading the source from Sourceforge and putting this together.
I went ahead and recompiled from source on my own computer and added the --enable-interface=xaw --enable-wrd in order to get the Karaoke midi lyrics to display correctly. The most work on lyrics was done to the xaw interface with trace turned on. Otherwise, they don't appear to be displaying correctly. (The old version of Timidity couldn't display lyrics properly at all.) If no one else is using Karaoke midi lyrics, timidity works fine as is. If anyone else needs that functionality, just thought I'd mention, you'll probably need to rebuild with extra config parameters. Run timidity -ia and turn trace on. You should see several piano keyboards in the window along with the lyrics when it's working properly.