Music Lessons

Mom held my hand as we crossed Oak Street on the way to my first day of kindergarten at Hohokam Elementary in Scottsdale, Arizona. I wore a short blue dress with a big white collar, patent-leather shoes, lacy socks, blonde bangs, and light blue cat-eye shaped glasses. It was 1969. My school was two blocks from our house and just down the street from the cotton fields at the Salt River Indian Reservation.

I walked into my classroom and right over to the gorgeous play kitchen in the front corner of the room. Do I get to play here? I thought. I didn’t know if I was allowed to touch and I wanted so much to touch everything! The painted wooden stove, the little pots and pans, the red dials that were just the right size for my small hands. I was in awe! And my teacher, Mrs. McKinney, had a piano! I wanted to touch that piano as much as I wanted to touch those pretty red dials on the play kitchen oven. She was one of the older teachers at my school, close to retirement at that time, and I simply adored her.

Mom and Dad and me, 1969.

At some point during those first weeks of school, all of us kids stood around that piano while Mrs. McKinney played for us. She played patriotic and old folk songs. We Skipped-to-m’Lou’d and Go-Tell-Aunt-Rosie’d our little hearts out for her.

To me, she was a rock star in a little gray bun.

The first time she played for us during class, I came home and told my parents I wanted a piano like Mrs. McKinney’s. Those beautiful white keys, shiny, soft and smooth, were precious gems under my little fingers. If I was lucky enough to touch and press down on a key, I was rewarded with a lovely sound. Pressed harder, it was louder. So many possibilities! The beautiful, shiny white keys on the right side of the piano had higher, tinkly sounds, and the ones to the left had lower sounds. I was in love!

We did not have a piano at our house, and no one in my family played music, as far as I knew, but Mom liked to sing. She hosted Sing-Along-with-Mitch-Miller parties where the adults played the records on the hi-fi and sang from ditto’ed lyric sheets. I learned later that all eight of her siblings had been given piano lessons, in fact, my uncle worked his way through college playing in a piano bar. But Mom, as the story went, got dance lessons instead.

“I want to play the piano,” I told my parents. They were conservative. They weren’t going to run out and buy any such expensive thing unless they were sure I was serious. So dad bought me a little electric chord organ that he enjoyed too. It had color-coded buttons you pressed to get a chord, and the keys were all labeled with numbers. The music sheets it came with were color-coded and numbered as well, so an aspiring musician could play the notes with the right hand and push the accompaniment buttons with the left. Pure bliss!

Around this time, Mom took me to a series of free piano lessons at our church. There were several other kids there, but I think I may have been the smallest. Our teacher, Mr. Drummand, gave us little pieces of green felt the size of guitar picks, and we had races.

“Put the felt on a C key” he would say, and we would all run up to the piano and try to be the first kid to put the felt on the correct key. I loved those lessons so much!

Eventually, my parents bought a piano. It was a big ugly player piano that had been painted antique white. The paint was chipped and one of the legs was still brown. Whoever painted it that awful tint apparently didn’t finish the job. The keys, though, were beautiful and shiny and soft and new. Recently replaced. There were doors and switches and buttons for all the player components, but the piano didn’t have any of the old player stuff inside when we had it. Such mysteries! I could slide open the doors on the upright and see the strings as I played. I loved to put stuff in there, paper or cardboard, candy wrappers or bits of plastic, and listen to the hammers hit the whatevers before hitting the strings. My favorite was paper from one of Dad’s long yellow legal pads. That made satisfying buzzes over a whole octave, taking me and my imagination to an old western saloon with card-playing men and dancing ladies.

Mom signed me up for lessons with Mr. Drummand. Not private lessons, but in a group setting at his music studio in the 7-11 storefront. He had two rooms, one for piano and one for guitar, and in the piano room, he had two old uprights, not unlike mine at home. During lessons, there were two students at each piano.

“Let’s do it to it!” he would say at the start of each lesson.

He gave each of us a steno-like spiral notebook to keep track of our practicing time between our weekly lessons. We were supposed to fill in the daily boxes with how many minutes we practiced each day, and I was terrible at tracking. Still am, actually, although I’ve since learned that keeping track of things (calories, hiking miles, dollars spent) is a good way to simplify life and meet goals. But I digress! If I were to come to a piano lesson and play the assigned piece with some level of competency, but didn’t have any minutes marked in my book, he gave me a bad grade. The thing was, I didn’t care about the grade. I just wanted to play. If I liked the song we were learning, I practiced it over and over and then played it quite admirably, I thought. But if I didn’t like it, or it was a bit too hard, I didn’t put in the minutes.

“You practiced perfect mistakes,” he would tell me during those weeks. It was true! I would play the song imperfectly the same way every time.

It was during those lessons that I learned that practice does not make perfect after all. Practice makes permanent.

Except…. nothing is actually permanent, is it? Permanent is really only temporarily permanent. If I wanted to play a song accurately, and quit making the same mistakes over and over again, I had to change up my practice routine. Simple as that.

I had to slow down.          

I had to practice the piece in smaller sections.

I had to master the song a measure at a time, rather than try to hack through the whole dang song hoping it will “do.”

Excellence is in the details, you know.

Mr. Drummand also taught me that I didn’t have to play a song exactly how it was written for it to be good. A musician can improvise! Sometimes, he would write the name of the chords at the top of a piece of music, and then tell us to play something different in the left hand than what was written. Usually, that meant a “waltz bass,” in three-quarter time. Play the right-hand melody as written, then use the left hand to play a bass note low, count one, then the chord triad an octave up twice. Three counts. Oom-Pah-Pah.

I liked that challenge. Freedom within structure.

I continued to take piano lessons with Mr. Drummand all through elementary school and up through eighth grade. When I entered high school in the late 70s, however, I quit piano lessons and started teaching myself how to play guitar. Guitar seemed cooler at that point, and a good way to attract boys. I wanted to play “Stairway to Heaven” and all my favorite John Denver, Joni Mitchell and Beatles songs. I was able to translate the chord theory I learned from Mr. Drummand to my new instrument and, with help from other guitar-playing friends, I taught myself how to play.

Mrs. McKinney introduced me to the piano and Mr. Drummand taught me how to play it. I have accompanied vocalists and have lead groups in song since I was a teenager, on piano and guitar. In my life, music has brought people together, created community, and provided heart-opening experiences.

I feel lucky to have had music as one of my earliest languages.

But if I’m really lucky, maybe someday I’ll be that rock star in the little gray bun.

Most importantly, it’s okay, maybe even required, to think off the page and improvise. (Especially in uncertain times!)

Piano and felt photo Illustration by Terri Charles. Thank you Terri!