Lyle Hadlock, local pianist shares story
I have a great love of music and sharing it with others. It all started, as a little boy of three years, when I use to stand by the piano and listen to my mother play all of the old standards dance songs from the turn of the last century. Springtime in the Rockies, and My Wild Irish Rose, just to name a couple. I became familiar with the catchy melodies and started picking them out with one finger on the piano, or playing along with mom on the top hand as she was playing a ragtime sort of style that was her own.
Very soon, I started learning to play with a rudimentary bottom hand to accompany my right handed melodies and then everything sort of evolved from there, as my ear matured and developed. Over the years, I went on to mimic the piano playing style of my mother Reta Hadlock, that was very much loved and danced to by thousands of people over the many decades that mom had her little band.
My brother Leo, four years my senior, when entering Jr. Highschool, wanted to play the clarinet in 7th grade band. He dropped out of band halfway through the school year. The clarinet sat on the shelf at home. When I was about to enter Jr. Highschool, five years later, I wanted to learn to play it. So I started playing the clarinet and two years later picked up the Tenor Saxophone as well. After starting to play the Sax, I began sitting in with my mom’s little dance combo playing the same melodies on these instruments in live dance situations that I had been playing on the piano at age three. These Jr. High and High School years would become my training ground and foundation for many years to come.
I enlisted in the Marines and became a bandsman. I was getting paid to play the clarinet, saxophone and piano, three things that I really loved. Later on, I became mom’s occasional substitute on the piano in her combo and later after her death the official piano player of her band for a seven year stint.
Music is an inherent part of my life. It has bought me much satisfaction in being able to bless others lives with something that has been so much a part of me for 50 years.