Setting a Tone: Introduction and Chapter One–The Piano as Sailing Ship

Lessons with Sammy Price, the King of Boogie-Woogie

Today I officially launch Setting a Tone, my book about studying piano with Sammy Price. What follows is an introduction and the first chapter. I have also narrated a VoiceOver.

Copyright © by Douglas Whynott, 2025

Cover photo by Steve Long

Epigraphs:

"Pete Johnson and Sam Price are mere perfection when they play the blues. Nobody can touch them. To play real blues you must have that certain something, well, call it some sort of feeling. Many don't have that. But Pete and Sam really got it. That's why I say they are as great on the blues as Tatum is in jazz. –Oran “Hot Lips” Page

"He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the way to find out is to try; to try and make it do everything." –James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues"

About the Author:

Doug Whynott studied documentary journalism as an undergraduate student at the University of Massachusetts, and narrative nonfiction in the graduate MFA program there. He has taught writing and nonfiction at the University of Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke College, and in the MFA programs at Columbia University and Emerson College. He received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach American nonfiction writing and literary journalism at the National University of Colombia in Bogota, teaching graduate students in the only MFA writing program in South America. His most recent book, The Sugar Season, won the Greenbook Festival award for writing about the environment. For ten years he was the concert piano tuner at the Fine Arts Center at the University of Massachusetts.

Excerpts from Reviews of My Previous Books:

My approach as a writer has been to stay on the scene with a topic and set of characters for a long period, to sustain attention, to look closely, be patient and wait for something telling to happen. I took the extended look with my books about migratory beekeepers, with boatbuilders, and others. I did the same with Sammy Price. Here are some clips from reviews that get at the idea of sustained attention.

A Unit of Water, A Unit of Time–Joel White’s Last Boat: "With understated grace, the author evokes a sense of the maritime community as well as a fierce devotion to boats and a love of the sea, which emerges as an almost mystical form of communion with nature and the cosmos... E. B. White would have approved of this quietly profound book; it's a real beauty." –Publisher's Weekly

A Unit of Water, A Unit of Time–Joel White’s Last Boat: "Whynott's attention transcends his ostensible subject until it becomes a profound look at the human condition." –San Francisco Chronicle

Following the Bloom–Across America with the Migratory Beekeepers: “In this enthralling book, bees... and the migratory beekeeping business... are captured in prose that, although factual, evokes transcendental contemplation and daydream." –Booklist, starred review

Following the Bloom–Across America with the Migratory Beekeepers: "Biography and autobiography, popular science and travel writing, the history of beekeeping and the natural history of bees... Whynott excites our wonder." –The New York Times Book Review

Giant Bluefin: "Mr. Whynott, an 11th generation Cape Codder, celebrates the wonder of these fish most expressively in these pages. . .He stuns us with the bluefin's delicate mortality rate. He dazzles us with accounts of their ability to swim together. . . In this eloquent book, Mr. Whynott holds science up to reality. He leaves the reader rooting hard for the survival of the giant bluefin, 'fish of show, splendor and speed,' as he makes clear. But unusually enough, he also leaves you rooting hard for the people." –The New York Times

A Country Practice–Scenes from the Veterinary Life: "Whynott's portrayals are moving and involving. He is a most invisible observer. This is an absorbing inside look at a changing profession between a veteran owner, an experienced young man with ambitions of his own, and a neophyte struggling to find her place. A book to be enjoyed by anyone who likes animals and a must for aspiring veterinarians." ­–The Portsmouth Herald

The Sugar Season–A Year in the Life of Maple Syrup, and One Family’s Quest for the Sweetest Harvest: "The kind of narrative that celebrates the ordinary in life. In doing so, however, it uncovers the extraordinary." –Literary Journalism Studies

Chapter One: The Piano as Sailing Ship

From the beginning I saw the piano as a vehicle of personal transformation. At least that's the way it was presented to me, story by story. Or maybe I was just hard-wired to see it that way.

When I broke a tendon on the ring finger of my right hand playing intramural football, a doctor told me I wouldn't be able to bend the last joint in that finger, that it was unrepairable. My first thought was, "What about the piano?” I thought this even though I couldn't play the piano, had not had lessons, and could only play rudimentary figures I had worked out on the organ at home, the organ my mother played. I wondered why that would be my first thought.

I grew up on Cape Cod, where there were lots of stories of seaman and sailing ships. At one time, in my small town of Yarmouth, in the nineteenth century, most boys wanted to go to sea. My grandfather's grandfather went to sea as a cabin boy when he was twelve, on a ship captained by his older brother. He captained his own ship at twenty-four, when the era of commercial sailing ships was coming to an end. He sailed a leaky old wooden vessel from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a ship the owners in Boston were trying to squeeze their last dollars out of. My grandfather's father went on a voyage with him one summer when school was out, a trip on the classic "triangle," carrying salt cod to the Caribbean, trading for molasses, and sailing on to Europe to trade goods to transport back home.

"Those boys sailed around the world with only a sextant and compass and dead reckoning," my grandfather, Samuel Thacher, told me. He was a boy at the end of that era and remembered seeing the retired sea captains at his great uncle's general store, waiting around a stove in the morning to get their mail. A classic scene of old times. The story I remember most, the one that struck me most, was the one he told of a retired seaman he talked with, Hallett Gray Thacher, who went on a voyage to China. He got on the bad side of the captain, who sent him up in the crow's nest as a lookout far too often. The man jumped ship in Shanghai, and played piano in a bar until he met another captain from Cape Cod and joined his crew. A journey on a sailing ship, yes, but the true vehicle was the piano, and how the seaman presented his story, and how my grandfather presented it to me, and, given my wiring, how I heard it, and how I thought, what adventure for me?

There was the story of my father's uncle, Douglas Woodman, who, when his father died, locked himself in a room after days at school and practiced the piano. He formed a band in his teens and helped support his family. After high school he auditioned for a job as a pianist at Steinway Hall, and traveled with a band by train, he told me. He was playing gigs in Boston until the Depression came and those jobs dried up. He and a cousin opened a jewelry business, and eventually my uncle opened his own store on Washington Street in downtown Boston, which made him wealthy and allowed him to buy a home on Cape Cod, where he played on weekends. The piano delivered him there, and that story was in the sounds he made on those Sunday mornings, or at least I heard it that way.

My grandmother's father on my mother's side, Benjamin Hallett, was a church organist, and he too was the son of a seacaptain. But unlike the boys he grew up with, he did not want to go to sea, and was bullied by them. Benjamin wanted to play music, and as his story went in the journal he left behind, he walked to Hyannis on Sunday afternoons for his organ lesson, with a dried fish in his pocket for dinner. His father, the sea captain, did not approve. The boy moved to Connecticut to take a position at a church, and began his career. His story in his journal ended with a return to Yarmouth to present a concert at the church he grew up in, where he was greeted by and shook hands with some of those boys who had mistreated him.

Finally, the story of my mother, whose transformation I witnessed firsthand. She and my father married at a young age–she the best dancer in her high school class, and he the best dressed. A perfect match, but for my mother, to my eyes, dissatisfaction set in when I was in my early teens. My father must have sensed that, of course, and to my mind that dissatisfaction is what prompted him to buy an organ and leave it in the living room at home. She wasn't interested at first, but took the complimentary lessons at the music store in West Yarmouth. She had a good teacher, who played jazz, and soon my mother began to practice. She developed a goal to play the music she had danced to during the World War II years at her high school and at the military bases on Cape Cod. I loved my mother, yes, of course, but as I watched her transformation, I admired her. She had a specific goal to play "Satin Doll." She spent an entire year learning how to play block chords by the George Shearing method. She studied the music of Errol Garner, Bill Evans, of Count Basie, of Duke Ellington.

In the very beginning, when she played the most basic tunes, like "Sailing, Sailing," ("over the ocean waves"), I played along, imitating her. My father's boss at his job selling appliances at Cape and Vineyard Electric, also took up the organ, and played a halting "Sailing, Sailing," that I was able to imitate and make my mother burst into laughter. Then, when I imitated her another time, she turned away from the keyboard and faced me, and said, "No, not this." I knew how important playing had become to her. Soon she was so far beyond me there was no chance I could imitate what she played, even if I wanted to try.

When I asked if I could take lessons, while in high school, she said she would talk to her teacher. She came back and told me I was too involved in sports, meaning I wouldn't have time to practice. I accepted it, didn't protest, just felt that the organ was her thing, her private thing. She never played out, and I'm not sure I could refer to her as a jazz musician, but she did indeed play jazz.

All to say that I boarded the sailing ship that is the piano after a couple years of college. My mother was heartbroken that I left school, but I told her I would return. My father said he wanted to get the payment part over with, and I told him I would pay for the rest of it myself, even though I didn't know how I would do that.

I spent nine months at a tourist aquarium putting on dolphin shows, working from a script, telling Salty, Stormy, and Spray, to jump through hoops, play basketball, put on fire hats and spit out fires, and take a rolled up piece of paper ("the cigarette trick") out of my mouth ten feet above the water. I leaned out of a pulpit with my hands behind my back. When fall came and the tourists left, a friend offered me a piano. Her parents were remodeling and wanted the old upright gone. I read in a publication called The Whole Earth Catalog that I could tune pianos as a job. I returned to my high school guidance counselor's office, and found a listing for a correspondence course in piano tuning.

With my girlfriend I rented a cottage in Eastham–rents were cheap in the winter on Cape Cod then–and spent that winter studying piano tuning during the mornings. In the afternoon I studied piano theory and performance, using my mother's books. I learned how to play the Sixty Jazz Chords before I could play a tune. I worked through a book of jazz riffs. But I didn't want to play jazz. I wanted to play blues. Mostly.

I wasn't sure how to get there. I listened to Muddy Waters, and Howling Wolf, and the B. B. King record I owned in high school. I tried to pick out basic figures from the background, the piano playing behind the singers.

There had been a moment, long ago, that ignited this, before I heard any of the stories, a moment that came simply from within me, a moment when I wanted to know.

It was a Sunday, on a visit to Uncle Doug's and Aunt Dolly's house. Just my mother and me. I must have been five, I figure, because I wasn't much taller than my mother's waistline. Uncle Doug wasn't at home, and so the sound of his playing on Sunday mornings was absent. Instead, a radio was playing in the kitchen. Some music came on, the most joyous music, piano music. My mother was talking with Aunt Dolly, but I interrupted and asked, "What is that music?"

Three decades later, after a first piano lesson with Sammy Price, I told him this story. We had finished lunch in Boston at a soul food restaurant called Bob the Chefs, and were headed to the hotel in Cambridge where he would be playing that night. He asked when I first heard boogie-woogie.

"What did she say?" he asked.

"She didn't answer me. So I pulled on her dress and asked again."

"What did she say?"

"Boogie-woogie." He laughed.

Of course, the oceans he crossed were far vaster than mine. His was a great American story.

Some could say that my ship was a product of the unconscious, released at about the time I was telling dolphins to jump into the air, and when I told a friend I was looking for a piano.

The Piano. The marvelous, crafted sailing ship, vehicle of transformation, that has carried so many lives from here to there.

(Ship photo credit to Rick Reynolds)