Gifted with perfect pitch as a young child, Bonnie Whitehurst made music her life, and her career.
She started piano lessons at age 3, and became proficient on guitar, autoharp and other instruments. In the early 1990s, she fulfilled a longtime dream by obtaining, and learning to play, the concert harp.
“Learning to play” might actually be overstating things slightly. “I could play it in a minute,” Whitehurst says. “Because it’s a vertical piano.”
Today the native Midwesterner and Pinellas County resident is an in-demand harpist and singer, primarily for weddings. It keeps her busy.
Somehow, Whitehurst found time to write a children’s book. Published by St. Petersburg Press, All Kinds of Music is a simple, rhyming story, with colorful illustrations by Leah Lopez, describing the various places, and circumstances, young people will hear music (“Music of the seasons, weather cold or weather warm/Music Mother Nature sends/Whenever there’s a storm”).
“I hear music in everything,” the author explains. “The vacuum cleaner, the leaf blower … I hear music everywhere.”
Every Saturday, Whitehurst plays organ and sings, from 3 to 7 p.m., at Esprit de Santo Catholic Church in Safety Harbor. She taught music there, five days a week for 22 years, and in the public school system.
Whitehurst, who grew up near Flint, Michigan, has a BA in ethnomusicology from Oakland University.
From the start, it was music, music, music. “The strange thing about it was that I was adopted, and I grew up in a family of musicians,” she reports. “But then, when I was in my mid 20s, I found my biological family – and found out that they were all musical, too. So it’s a real nature/nurture kind of thing.”
She was the vocal arranger, and guitarist, for a folk music band that stayed and played together from the 5th grade until Whitehurst graduated from college.
Within a year of her 1979 arrival in Pinellas, she helped found Largo’s Cultural Arts Program, part of what was called the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), a government grant program that was discontinued in 1982. She worked with a children’s theater program, and was an artist-in-residence with the Pinellas County Arts Council.
“And for years,” Whitehurst recalls, “I was a restaurant and bar singer, and I was a church musician at the synagogue, the Unitarian Church and the Catholic Church, all at the same time.”
She earned a Master’s in music theory from the University of South Florida about the same time she got her first harp.
Whitehurst says she receives two or three requests a week to play and sing at weddings. She takes as many as she can, but her Esprit de Santo schedule sometimes gets in the way (“Most weddings are at 4 or 5 o’clock on a Saturday”).
And a good percentage, she explains, are on the beach. Whitehurst says she’s one of the few wedding harpists willing to take her delicate instrument on the sand. She has a main harp for “fancy” indoor events, and a more lightweight instrument for the beach.
She composed All Kinds of Music, over a period of time, as a poem during her teaching years. “I’ve been traveling through my bucket list these days, and this was one of them,” she says.
The book ends with several interactive pages – questions for children/readers, including “Think about how much music is a part of your daily routine – what would life be like without any music?” and “Who in your family plays an instrument or enjoys singing?”
The inclusion was no afterthought. “I thought, I’m going to put all these questions at the end, so all my teacher friends who can’t get a sub that’s musical can at least use this book and have a built-in lesson plan.”
All Kinds of Music was ultimately created for an audience of five – Bonnie Whitehurst’s grandchildren. “I just wanted it to be something that my grandchildren had, always,” she explains, “to remind them of me.”
All Kinds of Music is available, in hardcover or softcover, from St. Petersburg Press, Amazon and Tombolo Books.
This content provided in partnership with StPeteCatalyst.com
