When Joy of Music School volunteer Josh Gaither arrived at his mentor’s workshop one grey afternoon in 2013, he knew it would be no ordinary meeting. The man awaiting him, Knoxville’s venerated, prolific piano tuner Frank Hambright, was 89 years old and his health was failing.
As they sat down together, Frank told Josh how proud he was of his star student. Then, without fanfare, Frank handed him his worn bag of tuning tools. “Keep them,” he told the young man. “These are yours.”
A few weeks later, Frank passed away at age 90.
Josh and pianos go way back. He was a precocious child, already playing piano at age three. Later on he took up guitar, drums, saxophone and bass, and played plenty of rock band gigs. But his connection to piano was special.
After high school, Josh worked in restaurants to make ends meet while playing music. At 24, he enlisted in the Army and served two tours of duty in Iraq. When he returned home, he studied music at Pellissippi State Community College under Tom Johnson. While Johnson noted that Josh “was an excellent piano and saxophone player,” he recognized Josh’s special gift at the keyboard. Josh remembers that Johnson “steered me back to the piano, and toward jazz.”
Taking Tom’s advice, Josh went on to study jazz piano at University of Tennessee with Donald Brown. Late in his time at UT, Josh learned that the Joy of Music School needed volunteer teachers. So he applied, saying he wanted to “give back to the community, and I already loved working with kids.”
It was around this time that Josh met Frank Hambright, who had been tuning the School’s pianos for about a decade, and began to work with him. The inspiration of his mentor and his own keen interest in the piano as an instrument pushed him to pursue piano tuning and technology as a second career. With encouragement and support from Frank, Josh finally realized his dream and started Volunteer Piano, where he tunes, repairs, and rebuilds pianos for a living.
After Frank’s passing, Josh got so busy with his business that he had to stop teaching piano as a volunteer. So nowadays he devotes his time at the Joy of Music School to tuning and maintaining the pianos—a wonderful way to keep his mentor’s legacy alive.
Joy of Music School 