Mrs. Curry and the "Three B's"
At Elmdale Mrs. Curry was our music teacher. She taught our class in the school auditorium because that's where the only piano in the building was located.. She was student of serious music. She taught us about symphonies, and all the various instruments in a symphony orchestra. She taught us about the three B’s – Brahms, Beethoven and Bach. She introduced us to Wolfgang Mozart, even though the chances were between slim and none that we would ever take a seat in a concert hall, listen to an orchestra perform The Requiem, and yell “Bravo” at the end of the performance.
It wasn’t cool for a kid from the farm to be interested in what we called "longhair" music. This was long before the Beatles. For some reason, the whole thing fascinated me, and many years later, I would come to understand more of what she tried to teach us. I never forgot the “three B’s.” College helped with that some. I did a bit of research on my own, and during the eighties, we actually had season tickets to the symphony. It was a stretch for a guy who started out on Ernest Tubb but some of it took.
It must have been a frustrating experience for a refined woman like Mrs. Curry to teach a class of country yokels about classical music. We didn’t go home and sing arias to the cows, but strangely enough I’ve never forgotten that introduction. I’m not exactly a “patron of the arts,” but I have some appreciation for serious music, and I’m able to identify the melody of many different scores. It is a mistake to think that teachers in country schools were uneducated hicks, who couldn’t hold a real job. Many of them had class. I’ll never know why Mrs. Curry was hired by the Taylor County school board. And I don’t know if she went home and cried over our failure to appreciate culture, but she did make a contribution to my education.
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