with his first set of drums.
I sat down recently at my drum set upstairs and a memory flashed into my mind. I was 13, had met a new friend my age just two streets over and found out he was playing boogie woogie on his downstairs piano. His name was Pat Boyer. He knew just two songs, one was by a guy named Pine Top’s. I was enchanted. I started tapping out a beat on my knees. It wasn’t long until I got my hands on some jazz brushes and I would tote the big Detroit phone book with me and smack out a beat with those brushes and we’d would play for hours. It was 1942 and I graduated from the 8th grade and then July 5th was my 14th birthday, My parents combined the two occasions and gave me a gift of a hundred dollars. I went out and bought my first set of drums. It was an ancient set at that time but I would spend hours just banging away on those drums. Sometimes I’d carry just my snare drum and high sock cymbals over to Pat’s basement and we’d play for hours together.
My mom persuaded me to go with her downtown to Grinnel’s Music Store and take drum lessons. The first thing the instructor said was for me to put my drum set away for the first six months and that was the last lesson I took.
I later had two exciting adventures in the army playing drums and one saved my life, but those are different stories. I went to the internet and found this site. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d125OlLULs Sure enough I found Pine Tops Boogie and I was enchanted again. In these challenging times with the virus and all it is a good thing to find a little enchantment.
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