My mom was a piano teacher. In my earliest memories, there was a piano in our living room. I remember kids coming to our house in the afternoon to take lessons. My mom sat in a rocker next to the piano as her students played their weekly assignments. If they did well enough, they would get to take a star sticker out of the box on the piano and place it in their lesson book on the page with that song. The stars were like old stamps and had to be licked to get them to stick to the page. If someone did especially good on a song, they would get two stars. Our family has home movies of me when I was around 4 years old climbing onto the stool and picking around on the piano. I didn’t understand at the time that we had a silent movie camera, and no one would be able to hear me play. I didn’t want anyone to hear me play. I don’t know what my ability was at the time, but I do know that I was not shy about picking around on the piano.
My mom used a book call Teaching Little Fingers How To Play for most of her students as their first lesson book. The first song in the book was called Birthday Party, the second was Sandman’s Near and the third was Baseball Days. With each new group of students, I heard these songs over and over. One day when I was picking around on the piano, I started playing these songs from memory. I didn’t have the book and hadn’t paid that much attention to where my mom had told the students to place their hands. But while I was banging on the piano, I recognized the pitch of some of the keys and picked around until I had found the notes for these songs. These songs were simple melodies containing very few notes played one at a time. But my mom knew that because picked these out showed that I had the ability to play by ear.