Well, I'm really intrigued about Viola Smith. I did some more internet searching and I've discovered she was part of an all-girl swing band, Frances Carroll and the Coquettes, from 1939 through the early 1940s. There is a short (10-minute) film of them performing made in Feb. 1940 that has been played on the Turner Classic Movie Channel. Information I found said it was directed by Ray Mack. It's available to purchase and view on some web sites, so I will be buying it in the next day or so. But I haven't found anything else out about her or the band.  Carroll was the singer and dancer and there was one other girl in the band, but I don't know what she played or did or even her name. I'm interested in watching their performance since Smith was compared to Gene Krupa, which is the most impressive comparison I have found online about a female drummer. I posted a message on the TCM short film message board, asking members if they know anything about Smith or the band. Hopefully I get some information about them.

My own practicing is going. I'm getting a little bored without a mentor right now. I'm able to play my last lesson, the nine-stroke roll, pretty good on the snare and all 3 tom toms. My left hand and lower arm aches a little after I practice, so I've got to make sure my form is right because I don't want an injury! I gotta work. I'm the sole supporter of 2 college girls. Once they are 18 and graduated there is no obligation of the father to continue child support and I haven't gotten any anyways in many many months so I say you gotta do what you gotta do because dropping the ball at this point is not an option for me Hopefully the house sells soon and I can rent something less than my mortgage payment until I decide what I want to do. Where I want to live. All I know right now is I don't want to live with a man ever again. I want my freedom to do what I want and come and go as I please. I have a dream for my life, it goes like this...
          I am a working performing percussionist in a band and in the studio. I travel the world playing, writing, photographing and exploring. Somewhere in the low country of South Carolina or in the French countryside I have a 1,000 acre ranch with a historic farmhouse on it in which I spend time with my family and friends. I have a care-taker to maintain the ranch while I'm on my travels....

I will add to this dream as it evolves in my head. For now my focus is becoming disciplined so I can learn  percussion and become the person I want to be.

I continue to practice about an hour each day until I start my lessons back the first week of July. I am ecstatic about lessons! I can't wait.  But for right now I've picked the lesson before the last one I took in the summer of 2009. I'm working on perfecting this lesson-getting faster and trying to play the whole page without mistakes. My left hand still lags. That's gonna take time, but I'm determined. I've heard that if you want different results you can't keep doing the same thing. So I gave up the wishing and I'm doing. No matter how tedious going over and over the same piece of music is. I do find that I get kinda excited when I can play more than the first few measures without getting tripped up. I'm working on snare drum music with the base drum. Very primitive, I know. I don't know yet how to read music for the other drums. I do have a page of simple drum beats with fills that I practice, but again, its snare, base and the high hat or ride cymbal. But I love it. I love practicing. I want to make my practices 2 hours a day. I think morning and night will be good. I will start that tomorrow. Some days that will be hard because I'm a nurse and I work 12-14 hour shifts 3 days a week. So on those work days I will have to kick in the old discipline and just friggin do it. No excuses.

I consider my drum teacher to be my mentor. He is famous in his own right. He's been a part of many famous bands and recorded and played with famous musicians. However, I want a girl or woman drummer to aspire to as well. I did an internet search and was only able to come up with a few women drummers. There are many many male drummers living and dead throughout the ages. But coming up with more than a few women drummers was not happening. Another thing about the women drummer info on line, which kinda pissed me off, was there was always some reference to how most women drummers were not very good. I don't know how true that is. I know I couldn't really find any famous names out there for a woman drummer, like an equivalent to Buddy Holly.  I did come across one woman drummer that intrigued me though-Viola Smith. According to my research Smith was the drummer in an all female jazz band in the 1940s while the men were away at war. Her talent was compared to the noted drummer Krupa. But there was very little info on her. I'm not sure if she's living or dead. It seems that once the men came back from war Smith didn't play anymore. There was a picture of her online. She was a cute petite thing with medium wavy brown hair. The set of drums before her looked enormous. But if she's been compared to Krupa, she must've been good. I must do more research. I want to know more about her.

Having my own studio is so awesome. I'm so ready to start some real lessons!!

Not only did my drum teacher call me back-he surprised me!! I start my lessons back at the music store the first week of July AND he offered to work with me some evenings during the week! Totally unexpected-totally! I continue to practice, going through my old lessons and reviewing. It's not going as bad as I expected. Working on perfecting the movements of my hands and wrists and trying not to get that carpel tunnel pain that tells me that I'm doing something wrong. It's so hard for me to play softly. I spend a lot of my practice time starting slow, getting as fast as I can then slowing down again. Also playing as soft as possible which really isn't very soft at all. Being right-handed, my left lags behind. I wonder if I will ever get to where my left hand is pretty equal to my right. My daughter says no. Well that makes me even more determined to make it equal. Don't tell me no!!

Then I throw on the head phones and try to copy the drum beats and fills. There are a few jazz tunes from my lesson days that I can keep up with for the most part.  My dream is to be a professional though . I know I'm a long way from that but I've got the rest of my life. I'm planning on living to 120 so that leaves 80 years. I gotta live that long to make up for the first 40 that I screwed up. I figure an average life span is about 80, so I want 80 more years to do things the right way. The first 40 were my practice years. Now is my real life. Thinking that way keeps me from getting down about the past which is real easy to do.

Yesterday I moved my drum set upstairs into my empty loft-area bonus room space, as I like to call it. Left over from my long marriage is this 3,000 square foot house. My ex gave it to me without any fight. He didn't even get a lawyer. I guess the variety of strange young crotch he samples was a whole lot more exciting than a dumb old house and a wife. So I've got this big old house all to myself with two kids away in college. It's been up for sale, but in this market it has hardly been shown and no offers. Last night I decided to make the most of his infidelity gift and utilize all the space FOR ME. My drum set has been in my master bedroom for the past year. My daughter and I hauled it upstairs in pieces and viola! I have an official studio. I am a real musician now with a real studio. It's huge up there, so I figure I can add a baby grand piano one day when I find some desperate soul trying to keep from going under in this economy and they are practically giving it away to keep from starving. But for now I love my new studio AND I created another space for myself downstairs. My daughter and I half carried and half dropped my prize chaise lounge and cedar chest I had sitting in the loft. They were pretty much swallowed up by that large space and lonely because I never went up there. Now they are looking dandy as part of my new bedroom. I created a sitting area with the beige paisley chaise lounge, a table, another end table and a lamp I had tucked away in a closet. This morning I found a red pillow and fluffy blanket to throw across the lounge. Three years into it and I'm starting to like this single and independent new life!

I didn't exactly find a teacher yet. I called a local university that has a music program. I wouldn't be able to start lessons there until the fall, the woman that answered the phone said, so that won't help me right now. I gave my former drum teacher a call this morning, but had to leave a message because he didn't answer. He's probably practicing. He's very disciplined-and that's my goal-to be like him. When I started taking lessons 3 years ago, I liked him instantly but was also very intimidated. I wanted to impress him, but I was just plain terrible so knew that wasn't going to happen. I was embarrassed to play in front of him at my lessons. He didn't do anything to intimidate me, it was my own insecurities working against me. I knew he didn't expect me to play everything perfectly and I sure didn't. I could play a piece fine at home, but when I got to lessons I got nervous and my hands and wrists didn't work right. I figured he was thinking, "This lunatic, shes not going to last a month."

But I really want to do this. So today I was sick to my stomach as I listened to the phone ring on the other end. Honestly I was relieved when the answering machine picked up. Calling him now after giving up my lessons a year ago is going to earn me a major eye roll and a sigh. I hope he calls back.

It started about 5 years ago, my urge to learn the drums. I was a stay-at-home mom at the time. I noticed when I listened to the radio in my jeep that I was focused on the drum beat. A little voice in my head always said "Yeah, I want to do that." Then the other voice that's always hanging around somewhere in the back ground chimes, "What are you thinking!!!! LOL. You looser. You're old. You're a Mom. Stick to driving your daughter to band practice. You take up drum lessons and she will be the laughing stock of the school."
But after a while, I stopped listening to the voice in the back of my head and took drum lessons at a local music store. I gave the lessons up after a couple of months because I wasn't impressed with that teacher. He seemed more interested in flirting with me than teaching me anything. About 2 years passed and I got the nerve up to try it again. This time at another music store across town. That's how I met my last teacher. He impressed me. He's got an actual 4-year degree in percussion and is one of the smartest guys I've ever known but not in a conceited way. So I've picked him as my mentor. Hopefully he will accept the assignment.

I consulted with my 17-year-old, just graduated from high school, marching band pit student, on the notes I was having trouble readng yesterday. She got me straightened out. I've got the quarter notes, eighth notes and sixteenth notes figured out now. I was right in a way yesterday, that measure was with an eighth note. It's like music is like a language. A single note is the letter and a group of notes makes the word. Ok seems I'm on the right track. I spent the morning away from reading music and played some different rudiments lightly and hard while I waited for my teacher, my chosen mentor, to call back.

Ok, so I seriously need a teacher, like ASAP! It's been a year since I took my last lesson and I am having trouble reading the music. In my last drum lesson, (the marking made by my teacher on my vol. 2 snare book is dated 8/11/09) I was working on the 9 and the 13 stroke roll. Well, I'm getting my quarter and eighth notes mixed up, so I don't think I'm playing any of this music right!! I can't find my vol. 1 snare book so I'm having trouble figuring this out. I'm pretty sure that the way this one particular confusing measure is played is using a quarter note, but it looks like a friggin eighth note to me!!! But to play that note as an eighth note along with the 9 stroke roll doesn't make sense, at least to my less than musical brain. I don't want to keep playing it if I'm playing it wrong because it will get etched in my brain that way and will take forever to get it out!

So my challenge for the day is to find a teacher. But I just don't want any teacher. I want a teacher like the Karate Kid had, but for drums. I want a mentor. That would be easy if I came from a musical family. But my drummer brother is in another state and nobody else in the family plays any instrument. I could call my former teacher, but I will look like an idiot because I wasn't exactly the star student in the past.

I started drum lessons in the spring of 2007, a few months before my marriage fell apart. I did pretty good with lessons for those 3 months. Then in one day my marriage was over. Well it didn't exactly happen in one day. Things were going on that I didn't know about. The day that I found it all out was the day it was over for me though. I didn't exactly deal with it well. I didn't want it to be over, but I didn't make the choices that ended it. I couldn't fix it because I wasn't in control of his choices. So I chose to leave the marriage physically. But I didn't leave it mentally or emotionally. I was a torrid wreck for about 3 years. It was like a really bad roller coaster ride through the dark that doesn't stop long enough for you to get off. Anyways, I continued my lessons, but I wasn't focused and practiced sporadically. Somehow I finished vol. 1 snare, and started vol. 2 in 2009, but I quit last summer. I have talked to my former teacher a few times since then, but he is really busy playing in a new band now and will probably have to stop teaching because of the band's tour schedule.

Find a teacher. That's what I must do today, so I can figure out the difference between my quarter and eighth notes. Because they are never always written the same in a measure. The note synonyms are what gets me confused a lot of the time.

But my teacher has to be special. Someone that I can connect to and not make me feel stupid. It is already intimidating enough being my age, being a girl and walking into a music store full of young guys and asking to sign up for drum lessons. Believe me I know, I've done it twice. Guess if I'm going to do this thing I better make some calls. Hey, I know, there's a nearby college that has a music program. Hmmm, maybe this won't be as hard as I thought.

This blog is about a new beginning. It's about my decision to choose how I want my life to be instead of life dictating what happens to me. Now is my time for action. Now is my time to be who I am supposed to be. No more excuses, no more waiting for just the right time. Today, June 7, 2010 I begin my journey to become a master percussionist. I'm likely the most UN-likely person to succeed at such an undertaking. I'm in no way a typical beginning musician. I'm female, I just turned 40, my youngest just graduated from high school and I'm officially on my own now. However, I've never been the typical idea of "Mom" either. My two grown daughters are always mistaken as my friends or my sisters and my daughters tell me I don't do the typical "Mom" stuff, whatever that is. I have decided to omit the empty-nester scenario from my life and replace it with the greatest life I can imagine-full of adventure, fun, achievement and fulfillment. I am going everywhere I want, doing everything I want to do and being who I want to be. Becoming a master percussionist is the first item on my list of "to dos." And I don't mean just being able to play percussion instruments, I am going to master them, starting now.

It's all about me now. It's never been about me before. I married at 20 and had kids at 21 and 22. My life kicked me in the teeth 3 years ago and ended my marriage, setting me on a path of uncertainty, humiliation and the greatest mental and physical pain I have ever known. I've wallowed in that misery long enough. All the success books I read during that time made me realize how my life turns out is the result of my choices. Today I choose action. The past is let go and I'm beginning the journey to me. I'm prepared for it NOT to be easy. I'm prepared to sometimes feel like giving up. But what will drive me through this is my desire to be the percussionist I want to be. I've had drum lessons in the past, but not recently. I have a silver Ludwig set in my house, 3 drum lesson books, a brother who is a professional drummer, a few musician friends and the iron will power of an ox. And so here begins my journey...