Category: Music Education

I had my first experience in band in the 5^th grade.  I played trombone.  I don’t remember why I played trombone.  It wasn’t like I wanted to play the trombone. I remember that the trombone that I played was provided by the school. I don’t think I was never excited about the trombone, but I didn’t dislike it either. When I was in 5^th grade, I still had the same teacher all day instead of changing classes.  It seems like band was something thrown in at an odd time of day and not on a regular schedule. It seemed like a half-hearted attempt at starting an elementary school band program.

My mom had a ukulele that sat in a shelf the headboard of my parent’s bed.  The headboard had the shelf and two sliding doors on either side of this shelf for storage.  I thought of it as a little guitar decoration for their bedroom and not a legitimate musical instrument.  At some point when I was in elementary school, I found out what it was. Mom showed me how to play the C, F and G7 chords and how to play Little Brown Jug. Soon she would buy me a song book that had chords and lyrics for over 100 simple songs.

In my previous posts, I talked about singing with my cousin Sammy and that he was an outstanding singer.  He won the youth talent contest at the Mid-South Fair in Memphis one year singing How Great Thou Art.  Because he won this contest, he got to travel to New York City and perform on a television show called the Ted Mack Amateur Hour. 

My cousin Sammy lived next door to us.  Sammy has an outstanding voice.  I mentioned in an earlier post that Sammy and I sang together around the house and occasionally at church.  Sammy was several years older than me.  When we first started singing together, my mom played piano for us.  In a few years, Sammy started playing for us to sing.  Sammy attended a Baptist church, and I went to a Methodist church.  People contacted Sammy to sing at church services and revivals and I started out more as a tag along. 

I was 6 years old when Johnny Cash’s live album At Folsom Prison was released. While it was my parents’ album, I listened to it almost all the time.  Folsom Prison Blues isn’t a kid’s song, but it became one of my favorites. At the time, I wasn’t playing the piano.  Mom might have started me on lessons a couple of times by then, but I never practiced and didn’t retain enough to say that I knew anything about playing piano. 

Shortly after I started first grade, I started taking voice lessons from a teacher in town named Joe Kincaid.  “Mr. Joe” had a lot of students that had success in talent shows at the Mid-South Fair in Memphis. My cousin Sammy was one of his success stories.  Sammy lived next door to us, and we sang together around the house.  We also sang together at church with my mom accompanying us. Several of Mr. Joe’s voice students were kids that were my mom’s piano students.

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.