The misadventures of my youth
included tons of melodic ad
venture: brass mouthpieces
freezing my lips off, fingering
chopped and screwed Scott
Joplin chords in record-break
ing slow motion, faring Ol’ Joe
Clark farewell in chamber chorale
on many an evening or afternoon,
sometimes with disappointingly tiny
audiences and other times with the
arrhythmically tachycardic panic attack
anxiety and sweat that comes when you’re
on a tiny stage with four or five other tiny
humans amid throngs of mostly drunken
festival attendees with nothing for ammo
or armor but your vocal cords. I took piano
lessons that were paid for in hard-earned
fashion and almost never practiced for any
of these weekly outings (these lessons took
place mostly at the mid-sized town of Fort
Smith, Arkansas until I graduated from high
school in an even tinier enclave in a sprawling
bit of Ozark rural-suburbia that existed a couple
dozen miles away from Fort Smith, and then for
school in an even tinier enclave in a sprawling
bit of Ozark rural-suburbia that existed a couple
dozen miles away from Fort Smith, and then for
three more years at a gem of a liberal arts under
graduate school a few miles from Little Rock, where
I also took a couple of years of voice lessons!).
As I let this sink in to my own little head, allow
me if you will to pose as an educated guess that
during all of this time the average amount of weekly
practice these fingers had each week between those
piano and voice lessons: cumulatively around fifteen
minutes. Plus, I sang for and with puppets that I some
times also puppetteered, performed in many church
musicals, tooted a trumpet and tinkled the ivories a
bit for a jazz band, played xylophone for an award-
winning half-time performance at no less than two
dozen high school football games for a percussive
interlude that was a version of (for real!) John Denver’s
Thank God, I’m a Country Boy which took place be
tween our marching band's performance of the theme
from Rocky and our grand finale, a version of On
Broadway, during which I had an improvised
fluid high-pitched swift-paced (ta-ta-ka ta-ta-ka)
brass solo. I was even the senior high school band
president. It was my junior year. Somehow, musically,
I’d go on. Three years of choir tours at college, hitting
all the “larger communities” of Arkansas (and some that
were even a wee bit beyond). I played Reveille while
marching for a couple of miles in a Veteran’s Day parade.
I did organ and grand piano solos, vocal solos, duets or
special choir performances, usually when the plates were
being passed around, at the Baptist church in which I
practically grew up. I sang a duet of Bette Midler’s
The Rose with another strong-willed and lovely
redhead whose name was Kim Burton at a Valentine’s
Day Banquet when I was thirteen or fourteen. On
several occasions, I’d be the adult choir director
and/or the Sunday morning service music director
at my church, also as a teenager. I played the piano
or sometimes the organ or sometimes sang at more
weddings and funerals than I can count, again, mostly
all as a teen (this I sometimes think is the primary
reason I began to slowly exit the musical performance
scene that had always played such a large part of my
young life). I played Nathan Detroit in pretty swell
community theatre production of Guy & Dolls the
summer I turned twenty-one, and a few years later,
in the early 1990s, I pretended to be Elvis (more hip-
shaking than singing, this gig) in front of hundreds
of people in Bowling Green, Ohio during a summer
theatrical production that I thoroughly enjoyed.
I wrote my master’s thesis on a postmodern
opera director of some renown. And I was
piano accompanist for a 2nd grade version
of The Nutcracker and (clearly the most
amazing—and most amazingly impossible—
accomplishment) was two of the four-handed
piano accompaniment to many of Brahms’
Liebeslieder Waltzes night after night and day
after day for the Hendrix College Choir’s spring
tour during my junior year in attendance there.
So you first might imagine how in the world I
did all of this, especially the piano performances
without much practice at all, or certainly not enough?
I’ve really no idea. But what I do know, as I listen
with giddily to my “Discover Weekly” playlist on
Spotify this week (and do they ever have my
algorithm, my list most always being a motley
assortment of the most bizarre but generally
upbeat ditties that a beat can be found within
but yet the songs otherwise would most all
have some difficulty finding homes in any
of even the most newfangled genres,
I’d call it a bunch of happy synthetic
and organic noise combinations that
exists on whichever week’s most far-out
fringes of whatever might be called pop),
is this: that whatever my commitment,
whatever my patience or my discipline
has NOT been in the study of music, the
As I let this sink in to my own little head, allow
me if you will to pose as an educated guess that
during all of this time the average amount of weekly
practice these fingers had each week between those
piano and voice lessons: cumulatively around fifteen
minutes. Plus, I sang for and with puppets that I some
times also puppetteered, performed in many church
musicals, tooted a trumpet and tinkled the ivories a
bit for a jazz band, played xylophone for an award-
winning half-time performance at no less than two
dozen high school football games for a percussive
interlude that was a version of (for real!) John Denver’s
Thank God, I’m a Country Boy which took place be
tween our marching band's performance of the theme
from Rocky and our grand finale, a version of On
Broadway, during which I had an improvised
fluid high-pitched swift-paced (ta-ta-ka ta-ta-ka)
brass solo. I was even the senior high school band
president. It was my junior year. Somehow, musically,
I’d go on. Three years of choir tours at college, hitting
all the “larger communities” of Arkansas (and some that
were even a wee bit beyond). I played Reveille while
marching for a couple of miles in a Veteran’s Day parade.
I did organ and grand piano solos, vocal solos, duets or
special choir performances, usually when the plates were
being passed around, at the Baptist church in which I
practically grew up. I sang a duet of Bette Midler’s
The Rose with another strong-willed and lovely
redhead whose name was Kim Burton at a Valentine’s
Day Banquet when I was thirteen or fourteen. On
several occasions, I’d be the adult choir director
and/or the Sunday morning service music director
at my church, also as a teenager. I played the piano
or sometimes the organ or sometimes sang at more
weddings and funerals than I can count, again, mostly
all as a teen (this I sometimes think is the primary
reason I began to slowly exit the musical performance
scene that had always played such a large part of my
young life). I played Nathan Detroit in pretty swell
community theatre production of Guy & Dolls the
summer I turned twenty-one, and a few years later,
in the early 1990s, I pretended to be Elvis (more hip-
shaking than singing, this gig) in front of hundreds
of people in Bowling Green, Ohio during a summer
theatrical production that I thoroughly enjoyed.
I wrote my master’s thesis on a postmodern
opera director of some renown. And I was
piano accompanist for a 2nd grade version
of The Nutcracker and (clearly the most
amazing—and most amazingly impossible—
accomplishment) was two of the four-handed
piano accompaniment to many of Brahms’
Liebeslieder Waltzes night after night and day
after day for the Hendrix College Choir’s spring
tour during my junior year in attendance there.
So you first might imagine how in the world I
did all of this, especially the piano performances
without much practice at all, or certainly not enough?
I’ve really no idea. But what I do know, as I listen
with giddily to my “Discover Weekly” playlist on
Spotify this week (and do they ever have my
algorithm, my list most always being a motley
assortment of the most bizarre but generally
upbeat ditties that a beat can be found within
but yet the songs otherwise would most all
have some difficulty finding homes in any
of even the most newfangled genres,
I’d call it a bunch of happy synthetic
and organic noise combinations that
exists on whichever week’s most far-out
fringes of whatever might be called pop),
is this: that whatever my commitment,
whatever my patience or my discipline
has NOT been in the study of music, the
education of music, and the almost no
practicing on my own before so many musical
performances that I always found myself
doing, music has been an integral part of
my life, and for as far back as I remember.
But I’m not a musician. Maybe a bit of an
afficianado. But. I am always more than
happy to spend whatever time it takes
to put together a few lines like these
to tell and/or retell such seemingly
inconsequential stories or collages,
pastiches such as this one that
performances that I always found myself
doing, music has been an integral part of
my life, and for as far back as I remember.
But I’m not a musician. Maybe a bit of an
afficianado. But. I am always more than
happy to spend whatever time it takes
to put together a few lines like these
to tell and/or retell such seemingly
inconsequential stories or collages,
pastiches such as this one that
I am presently overdoing, for
example. This is what I DO:
spend my time practicing, with disc
ipline and commitment, as my friends
here on the bookshelves around me
can at least attest, this is a thing
about which I have made quite
a point to set aside the time for
a long-term, ongoing education
and practice. Which means I can
spend hours on it pretty much
every single day, often humming
a few bars of some tune or another
as I go at it. Relatively speaking,
for me, it is this act that seems
to be my one indefatigable passion.
spend my time practicing, with disc
ipline and commitment, as my friends
here on the bookshelves around me
can at least attest, this is a thing
about which I have made quite
a point to set aside the time for
a long-term, ongoing education
and practice. Which means I can
spend hours on it pretty much
every single day, often humming
a few bars of some tune or another
as I go at it. Relatively speaking,
for me, it is this act that seems
to be my one indefatigable passion.
