Season Six
Episode 117
Making Music with Bill Henry and Bill Fite
Bill Henry: Bill Henry has been teaching elementary music for over a decade and recent Teacher of the Year nominee for Cecil County Public Schools. Bill also provides instruction privately and is the creator of the Online Piano Program for Kids called Rockin' the Keys.
Bruce Fite: Award-winning singer/songwriter, author, and podcaster Bruce Fite lives in Nottingham, PA with his beautiful wife and four children. He has been writing music and performing concerts for kids and families for the last 15 years. Bruce writes and performs three main genres of music: Christian Family, Educational, and Parody. His songs are heard weekly on The Kids Cookie Break on 90.3 FM, Lancaster, PA. One of Bruce’s Toilet Paper Hoarding parodies has almost 100,000 views on Facebook. Bruce has been teaching elementary general music for over 20 years. He also tunes pianos and leads the music at his church.
In his spare time, Bruce likes to enjoy the beautiful view from his front porch with a good cup of coffee. Many song ideas have been hatched while Bruce participates in one of his all-time favorite things to do- mowing the grass! It’s actually very therapeutic for him. He also has found a great deal of joy teaching his own children to appreciate and perform music. From singing and drums to piano and ukulele, there’s a whole lot of music happening at the Fite house!
Podcast Website
Bruce’s Website
Bruce’s Music (most of his songs) is on iTunes. New parody downloads can be found at brucefite.com/downloads.
Mr. Henry’s World Youtube Channel
TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW
Jessica: Well thank you Bill and Bruce from The Music Podcast for Kids for joining us today. We're so excited to have you and I would just love for you to just share what you're in the midst of doing and maybe your role as educators or some of the things you do on the side as well.
Bruce: Alright well my name is Bruce. Bill and I teach in the same district. We're in Cecil County Maryland. We live in Pennsylvania, but we're very close to Maryland so yeah - I teach music. I also lead the music at my church. I have two pianos and I write kids songs. I write educational songs and parodies and Christian kids songs for families. And so up until March that's what I was doing full-time and then we all of a sudden had a lot of extra time on our hands so now we're kind of diving into the podcast. So I teach General Music and Choral Music in Cecil County.
Bill: Yeah. My name's Bill Henry and I also teach in Cecil County K-5 General Music, but I also teach band as well so I have the band and string kids. And a lot of the times the teachers - Bruce, you're at one school - but most of the time the teachers are at two schools. With me having both of those responsibilities - the General Music and Band - I'm actually at one school which is nice. It was fairly new for me, but yeah - so teaching the core of the work, but then I also give private lessons. Piano was my principal instrument so I give a lot of piano lessons to kids and then I have some guitar students as well. Beginner guitar and drumset. So yeah - just giving private lessons and doing the podcast with Bruce here.
Jessica: That's great. Love it! And how long have you had the podcast?
Bill: The podcast we've had for almost a year so it's pretty new I would say.
Bruce: We launched it in October of 2019. Bill: It's getting close to a year.
Jessica: That's exciting! Congrats on that. That's neat! I feel like as educators a lot of music teachers - you teach, but then everything outside - well maybe not everything - but a lot of things outside of teaching are also music related. It's like you teach and teach piano and then you know you work with the children's choir or you're on the worship team at church. I think as musicians you have your music job and they continue to make music the whole rest of the day as well. That's awesome. So what do you enjoy about doing the podcast and working with the podcast and working with the families inside your schools or outside your schools?
Bruce: I think it's just fun to be a part of families. So even though it's virtual so it's almost like being on the radio so you're actually in the homes of families, which I think is kind of fun because I have four kids. My wife and I have four kids and we always have people over and love to host. We just love being with people and families in particular so it's kind of a fun way that virtually we can still hang out with people and still joke around and still teach like we do in our classrooms. And I think it's just kind of cool to have that connection where they can listen to it over and over again. I think that's fun just to be able to be part of families and students lives that way.
Bill: Yeah. yeah Definitely and I agree. It kind of makes you think of back in the day when they would just huddle around the huge speaker, right? And listen to the radio. When we weren't even around of course. That's the kind of - it's kind of like this warm fuzzy feeling when you get to know that you're a part of these people's lives in some virtual weird way, rught? It's really pretty amazing, you know, that there's this media now that we can share with people and hopefully ultimately educate them in music.
Jessica: It's really that evolved radio hour where the stories and yeah - it's wild because I don't know if I shared with you bill the last time we spoke, but just a lot of times I'll be recording inside of a closer like literally the clothes around me. You can record anywhere and I'm glad that more music teachers are doing that because I feel like we have so much we can learn from each other and it gives studetns and their families a way to hear a lot of different topics and just explore music in a totally different way which I think is just fabulous. So for the podcast what are some things if listeners were to tune in - what are some subjects that you talk about or that families would be hearing?
Bruce: Yeah, we have a variety of toipcs that we cover. For example, we have the orchestra. We just finished up a new original orchestra song that teaches about the orchestra through the song. We have the electric guitar, the piano, the electric keyboard, a lot of world music as well.
Bill: We do a lot of world music episodes.
Bruce: Like Africa.
Bill: Japan and yeah and some new ones we have coming out - Australia will be one that we're going to do. Actually got to even talk with Tim T for that show. He's geared more like piano teachers like private piano teachers and he's really awesome, but the reason we interviewed him is because he's from Australia and he has a podcast too. So yeah - it's just a lot of different things that we talk about on the show.
Bruce: And I think part of what I like about the podcast format is that in music class we have 45 minutes one time a week and then they're off to the rest of their day. This way really the sky is the limit. We can just brainstorm and come up with all kinds of fun ideas and take as much time as we need to develop things. That's what I've been enjoying is not feeling so cramped for time. You can just let the ideas flow out on the stream as you're typing away and then you clean it up and put it in a script and rock and roll.
Jessica: If you were to encourage other music educators who maybe aren't certain about how to get started on it, what would you say was really helpful for you being able to start and get a format for ideas and you know, just getting together some information to share? Because I feel like so many teachers are like - and I felt this way - but I feel like people feel like I don't know that I have that much to share, but I feel like so many people do. And so what would you say to people who might be interested in exploring it?
Bruce: Well a great way is to simply take what you already do in the music classroom and go with it. So you're simply communicating it to a different audience. You're not visually interacting like you would in the classroom, but I think that's the best starting point. They already have a wealth of knowledge and just like they would pick that one topic apart in their mind for a lesson plan or a unit plan they'd be able to start with that and that way they have their material and then the fun part, I think, is they can be different characters. It's all kinds of different voices and funny stories just to make it fun as they're learning so I think starting with their lesson plans.
Bill: Absolutely and there's a lot of things obviously they're going to learn how kids tick and how they are - what they're going to laugh at or not laugh at. So when you gain that information you can start to adapt things that you talk about on a podcast or a YouTube channel or something like that because you know your audience. You know kids and how they work. Yeah. I think that's a big part of it. It's understanding how they respond to the way you speak.
Bruce: Also too that knowing your target audience. So like ours is really more elementary age - maybe into fifth grade or so. Kind of narrowing it down so you know exactly who is listening. Of course parents are listening too, but I think that's important too. Because if it's a high school teacher that would be - they could have a lot of fun knowing who they're talking to and engaging around that.
Jessica: And I think you have a lot of experience - both of you - Bill doing the videos on YouTube and Bruce you've got some music that you've written. One song in particular I actually watched one of the videos of you performing it and it's called "Don't Put Your Cat in the Washing Machine." And so you perform concerts for families and what do you hope that families will take away musically and also through the messaging in the songs that you create for that audience?
Bruce: Yeah so that's... that song I call my one hit wonder. Like I had some people say now I know what the guys felt that wrote that song Play That Funky Music White Boy feel like a one hit wonder and there's others too now, but there's a radio station here locally that plays a lot of my songs and the host often asks "How'd that song come together? Must be a great story." I felt bad because well it's not really an interesting story. I didn't even have a cat at the time. I'm driving home from school and I thought 'That would probably not be a good idea to put your cat in the washing machine.' That's literally what happened. So sorry for the anti-climactic. Then I just started putting it together and it just kind of morphed into this weird... and we didn't even have kids at the time.
Jessica: No kids. No cats. Just a random, random thought in the car.
Bruce: The message that I try to... hopefully the folks take away is just to enjoy. To enjoy life. Live it to the fullest and having fun. Taking every day situations and putting them into a song. (12m)
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