David Cannon, vocal music teacher

TKC: How long have you been teaching at Kirkwood?

DC: This is my 16th year but my 33rd year of teaching school.

TKC: What something you’ll miss most?

DC: I’m a choir director, but I always say that I don’t teach music. I teach students just through the medium of music. As a very young man, my father told me a wonderful secret to life. He said, “David, (that’s my name), when you’re thinking about your future, find something that you absolutely love to do so much that you would do it, even if you weren’t getting paid to do it, and then find a way to get paid to do it.” He said, “you’ll never work a day in your life.” And I took that advice. This is my passion, my love. And it’s it’s been it’s been a great ride. I have a lifetime of wonderful memories, students, groups of students, different classes, concerts, tours, musically made. What happens in in any performing arts organization, like the choir band orchestra is you. You come in and you give him a piece of music, and you may not hear that music come to fruition for two months because it takes time to rehearse and to get it right. But on that magical day when all of a sudden we get it right, or we get one page, or we get the magic chord that happens and it gives you goosebumps, those are the moments I will probably miss the most because that’s that’s the stuff of life, and just seeing the joy on the students faces. And sometimes we’ll, we’ll achieve it. We want to say anything, let us look into other and the wall burst out laughing or something. I’ll miss those moments.

TKC: What were you like as a high school student?

DC: I got the bug for music early on from a wonderful teacher. I was always in band, but I was kind of a loner because my parents moved us elsewhere from third grade to sixth grade, then I came back in the middle of my sixth grade year. I found solace in playing guitar – I started playing guitar in sixth grade. And that was my thing to do. I would come home every day after school. Instead of wanting to play with friends, I was up in my room. I played guitar until dinner every night, and in doing so I practiced a lot. I got pretty good at the instrument. When I was in middle school, which is for a lot of people as the hardest years of their life, that was a hard time for me, but I found solace in the people who accepted me and that was the stoner crowd. So all my friends were in the 80s we called them burnouts. I hung around with those guys because I was in band with them and played guitar – much to my conservative parents chagrin. My sophomore year I was in the band room after school, and I was playing my acoustic guitar, sitting on a table. And there was no one there – just me. I was playing and singing. And all of the sudden I felt a hand on my shoulder that whipped me around, literally. I was startled and scared. A finger in my face says, “Why aren’t you in choir?” “I don’t know.” She said, “It’s too late for you to get in the class, but we have swing choir Tuesday nights at 6:30 p.m. Look, I said be there.” [The choir students] were all juniors and seniors, and they were the leaders of the school. These were the leaders of the school. They had their stuff together. They were smart. They were fun. They were funny. And all sudden, I’m in the group of these people. And I love it. All of the sudden I saw this is cool. I told my family about it. My sister took me shopping and bought me preppy clothes. In one weekend, I lost all my stoner friends. I was now in choir. So the following year, I am now the drum major of the marching band. I’m president of the concert choir. I’m playing oboe in the orchestra. I’m playing guitar in the jazz band. Music was it for me.

TKC: How would you describe your career at Kirkwood in a sentence?

DC: Kirkwood is everything that I never knew that I always wanted.

TKC: What’s something that your students would be surprised to know about you?

DC: Some of them know that I play professionally in a band in St. Louis, and we’re called Woodford Reserve. We play around town, and it’s pretty intense. Most [students] might not know that I am obsessed with astronomy and the United States space program. I can name every astronaut from the early 70s to now.