Pianos

 Pianos

This picture was taken around 1957 -- it looks like Ricky is about 1 year old.  This was our piano. We pretty much always had a piano in the house, wherever we lived. My mother played and started teaching me to play when I was pretty young. At some point I did start taking piano lessons, after we moved to Hartford. I can't remember my piano teacher's name, although I do remember approximately where she lived. I wasn't a very good student. I could play all right, but I didn't practice much. And I would forget (and so would my mother) when it was time to go to my lesson. One time we had forgotten so many times in a row that when I got there I found another student had taken my place! I think we had forgotten to go to my lesson for something like six weeks in a row. I was very embarrassed, to say the least. I had to sit through that other kid's lesson before my mother came to pick me up. (I don't really understand why there didn't seem to be any communication between my mom and my piano teacher. We did have a phone... and I assume the teacher had one, too, but maybe not.) Well, anyway, I think I stopped taking lessons from her. Mom had lots of music at home, so I continued to play and she would answer whatever questions I had, so I did still make quite a bit of progress with my piano playing. 

I took lessons from a different teacher for about a year, sometime during my junior high or high school years. We lived in town then, and I could walk to her house for my lessons. By the time I got to college I could play fairly well, and I continued taking piano lessons for those years as part of my music degree. I never was a really good piano player, though. I could read music and play it, but I couldn't improvise or play by ear. I never did learn to "chord" with my left hand, to accompany the melody. (Should have found me a Baptist or Pentecostal teacher.) I didn't have a natural gift for it like my mother did. 

PHOTO: I bought this piano when we lived in Arkansas, about the time my first child was born.

I had a vague notion of giving piano lessons while I was raising my children, but it never did pan out. After we moved to Alabama (my sons were age 5 and 2) I didn't have a piano in the house any more. I did teach elementary music at a local private school for one year, and played piano for the folk-dancing class there. That was fun. But after that I never really played any more, and, sadly, I've lost whatever skills I ever had.

Here are a couple pictures of my mother playing piano. These were taken about 1980 at her house in Downey, California.