Billy Joel

Billy Joel began piano lessons at about four. He did not arrive as a model student. His mother, Rosalind, had to pull a reluctant child toward the teacher, and the drills never held the same appeal as the instrument itself. “I didn't like the lessons very much, but I was enchanted by music,” he later said.

After his parents divorced, Rosalind supported Billy and his sister with clerical work. The lessons remained in the family budget. Joel recalled that they cost ten dollars apiece and that his mother required an hour of practice as soon as he came home from school, while the other boys went out to play. If he had not learned the assigned piece, both teacher and mother objected. He practiced because he knew she could not afford to waste the fee.

The piano brought its own social friction. Boys knocked the music books from his hands and mocked him on the way to lessons; he took up boxing to defend himself. Classical training frustrated him, too. His teachers prepared children for the concert hall, while he wanted the sound of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. The routine continued even as he began deciding what he wanted the skill to do.

That steadiness did not make the rest of adolescence orderly. Joel clashed with teachers and principals, joined bands in junior high, and worked clubs late into the night, partly to help at home. He attended only ninety days of his senior year, and Hicksville High would not graduate him. One teacher, Chuck Arnold, heard him playing piano after he had cut class and urged him toward music. The same teenager could be deeply undisciplined at school and disciplined at the keyboard.

The career was hardly guaranteed. Early bands and his first solo album brought years of false starts before Piano Man and, later, The Stranger established him. Rosalind had not mapped that destination. Her contribution was smaller and more repeatable: paying for the next lesson, insisting on the next hour, and letting a resistant child acquire technique long enough to claim it for himself.