Local
musician Pete Mealy started an after-school guitar club at Walker-Grant Middle
School in Fredericksburg. Photos courtesy FCPS.
Within a few
hours of publishing a Facebook post asking for donations of instruments for the
after-school guitar club he hoped to establish, Peter Mealy had received 14
acoustic guitars and $1,100.
That was enough
to give a guitar to every student who signed up for the new club at
Walker-Grant Middle School, which started meeting in January—and it’s also
enough to outfit a guitar club at James Monroe High School that Mealy hopes to
start up this fall. Mealy and his wife Laurie Rose Griffith, both guitarists,
have performed regularly around Fredericksburg for decades and Mealy has also
taught individual and group guitar lessons “forever,” he said.
He was inspired
during a January meeting of the Walker-Grant PTO to use his skill and passion
for teaching to create a new opportunity for Fredericksburg’s middle school
students—and give them the gift of music.
“Music is very
cathartic—it’s like a panacea,” Mealy said. “Every gig I play with my wife is
like the first one ever. It’s never any less exciting. It’s an incredible gift
that I don’t take for granted.”
Guitar Club met
for the first time in January and membership has grown from four to about seven
students. Each of them gets to take home a guitar, Mealy said.
The students
came to the club with varying degrees of experience and interest.
“One of them
can bang out some chords. One is a total beginner,” Mealy said. “Some of them
already play in the band or orchestra. One of them will ask me about things
like the diminished scale and the locrian mode. And there are kids who just
want to rock out.”
Mealy himself
is a self-taught guitarist and he’s published several books on technique. He’s
been working with the students on understanding scale and chord relationships.
“If you can
learn four chords in order—G, D, E minor, and C—you can play hundreds of
songs,” he said.
He’s also
working with the students on basic music reading and accompaniment skills. With
these basic skills and with practice, he said, they could “go out and get an
accompanist gig in six weeks.”
For an upcoming
meeting of the club, he’s asked students to come with a song they want to
learn.
“We’ll use
those songs as a vehicle for learning concepts,” Mealy said.
Pic 2 – Walker-Grant’s
after-school clubs meet twice a month on Fridays. There was a gap of about a
month between two of the sessions, and Mealy said he could tell the students
had been practicing during that gap.
Parents have
also sent him videos of their children sitting in their rooms, playing songs
and singing.
“I encourage
the students to also teach themselves,” he said. “They can go out and get the
information—it’s all there. If you want to play, go play!”
In addition to
maintaining the club at the middle school and expanding it to the high school
next year, Mealy said he would also like to offer guitar as an elective, like
band and orchestra.
He said it can
be easier for students to keep up with the guitar after graduating from high
school than it is to keep up with the trombone, for example.
For Mealy, the
guitar has been “an incredible gift that I don’t take for granted,” and he’s
looking forward to sharing that gift and making it accessible to
Fredericksburg’s public school students coming years.
