One of the courses taken predominately by the male students at Wagener-Salley High School during that time I attended was called “agriculture”.
The Wagener-Salley area of rural Aiken county, South Carolina being a farm oriented place indeed; I decided to catch the wave and take the plunge, delving into a totally new area of didacticism.
It was taught by a pillar of the faculty turned local legend in his own time, Mr. Spencer Smith — who has the distinction of teaching not only me, but all my brothers as well as my father and all of his brothers.
Periodically the student would engage in assembly in the auditorium for various reasons which typically included segments of cultural entertainment.
One day it was a silhouette montage projection on a large cotton sheet backlit by floodlights. Here various students performed skits depicting persons from history.
One of these featured Kevin Hutchinson — whom I immediately recognized from the outline of his very distinctive and pronounced eyebrows — sitting at the piano which he began to play.
It was a soft somewhat sad piece by the person he was portraying in the montage, Frederic Chopin — which was revealed to me sometime after the performance.
Later that day Mr. Smith had related how he recognized both the music and composer thereof from it’s particular style.
Later in my life I came to appreciate the fact that Mr. Smith knew a lot of things besides agriculture.
That must be why my dad had so much respect for him his entire life.
Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin
aka Frédéric François Chopin
March 1, 1810 – October 17, 1849
Polish composer and virtuoso pianist. A child-prodigy of the keyboard, he was born in Warsaw, Poland in the village called Zelanowa Wola.
He was one of the great masters of the genre known as ‘Romantic Music’ which include pieces such as preludes, etudes, and nocturnes.
He wrote technically demanding pieces primarily for solo piano. He also invented several musical forms and contributed to the evolution and refinement of many others.
Having emigrated to France he made a comfortable living in Paris as a composer and piano teacher, while giving a few public performances.
Chopin suffered from poor health for most of his life and died in Paris in 1849, at the age of thirty-nine from pulmonary tuberculosis.