FALLARTS
don't stop the music
Jan Perry has taught piano lessons for 45 years, and she isn’t slowing down anytime soon By Ma rie Muir | P hoto by J oh n M i c h a e l S i m ps on
s an 8-year-old, Jan Perry was dazzled by Jo Ann Castle’s animated piano performances on “The Lawrence Welk Show.” So her parents, James Leathers and Maxine Leathers, bought her an upright piano for $20 and signed her up for piano lessons with Carolyn Sims, their neighborhood piano teacher in Braggtown and church pianist at Northgate Chapel. “When I would get home from my lesson, some of the neighborhood kids would come over, and I would teach them what I just learned,” she says. Jan fell in love with her instrument, despite the fact that not every key worked. Her parents, who worked opposite shifts at Liggett & Myers, served as her first audience. As a Northern High School student, Jan accompanied concert choirs and school plays and even filled in for the pianist at church on occasion. Jan studied dental hygiene at Guilford College before dropping out to launch her own at-home piano studio at the age of 18. “I knew I wanted to do something with ivory,” Jan says. “I just assumed it was teeth.” Jan had 30 students by the end of her first year and enough saved up to purchase a Kawai Grand Piano, which she still owns today. In her 45-year career running Jans Piano Studio, Jan estimates that she has taught more than 1,000 students ranging from age 5 to 50.
FRIENDS & FAMILY
Jan adores her students and says there are only three things she loves more: God, Duke University and her husband, Bill Perry. 58
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durhammag.com
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august 2021
She met Bill in Kansas City at the Final Four of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament in 1988. They got married a decade later in the courtyard outside of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. The wedding cake was decorated with music notes and basketballs. Jan has given piano lessons to Duke men’s basketball players and even played duets with Grant Hill and Christian Laettner. In addition to her Duke family, Jan has been part of the Durham Music Teachers Association since 1989 and served as the independent piano teacher chair for the North Carolina Music Teachers Association. “I do think I’m a great piano teacher, but there are a lot of great piano teachers in Durham,” Jan says. “I’m a part of a community of teachers who learn from one another. ... We all have our unique style.” Jan discovered over her years of teaching that many students stop taking piano lessons in middle school. So she began providing group lessons with four to six students in her colorful basement studio. “In this day and time, if a child’s not having fun, they’re not going to continue [playing music] anymore,” Jan says. “As they are learning and progressing, there’s a hidden competitiveness, because you don’t want to be the student who is not prepared that day. Plus, it’s just more fun to make music together.”