{"id":44214,"date":"2025-11-12T20:30:01","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T20:30:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/44214\/"},"modified":"2025-11-12T20:30:01","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T20:30:01","slug":"longtime-musician-creates-a-book-for-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/44214\/","title":{"rendered":"Longtime musician creates a book for children"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gifted with perfect pitch as a young child, Bonnie Whitehurst made music her life, and her career.<\/p>\n

She started piano lessons at age 3, and became proficient on guitar, autoharp and other instruments. In the early 1990s, she fulfilled a longtime dream by obtaining, and learning to play, the concert harp.<\/p>\n

\u201cLearning to play\u201d might actually be overstating things slightly. \u201cI could play it in a minute,\u201d Whitehurst says. \u201cBecause it\u2019s a vertical piano.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today the native Midwesterner and Pinellas County resident is an in-demand harpist and singer<\/a>, primarily for weddings. It keeps her busy.<\/p>\n

\"\"Somehow, Whitehurst found time to write a children\u2019s book. Published by St. Petersburg Press, All Kinds of Music is a simple, rhyming story, with colorful illustrations by Leah Lopez, describing the various places, and circumstances, young people will hear music (\u201cMusic of the seasons, weather cold or weather warm\/Music Mother Nature sends\/Whenever there\u2019s a storm\u201d).<\/p>\n

\u201cI hear music in everything,\u201d the author explains. \u201cThe vacuum cleaner, the leaf blower \u2026 I hear music everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Every Saturday, Whitehurst plays organ and sings, from 3 to 7 p.m., at Esprit de Santo Catholic Church in Safety Harbor. She taught music there, five days a week for 22 years, and in the public school system.<\/p>\n

\"\"Whitehurst, who grew up near Flint, Michigan, has a BA in ethnomusicology from Oakland University.<\/p>\n

From the start, it was music, music, music. \u201cThe strange thing about it was that I was adopted, and I grew up in a family of musicians,\u201d she reports. \u201cBut then, when I was in my mid 20s, I found my biological family \u2013 and found out that they were all musical, too. So it\u2019s a real nature\/nurture kind of thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

She was the vocal arranger, and guitarist, for a folk music band that stayed and played together from the 5th grade until Whitehurst graduated from college.<\/p>\n

Within a year of her 1979 arrival in Pinellas, she helped found Largo\u2019s Cultural Arts Program, part of what was called the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), a government grant program that was discontinued in 1982. She worked with a children\u2019s theater program, and was an artist-in-residence with the Pinellas County Arts Council.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd for years,\u201d Whitehurst recalls, \u201cI was a restaurant and bar singer, and I was a church musician at the synagogue, the Unitarian Church and the Catholic Church, all at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

She earned a Master\u2019s in music theory from the University of South Florida about the same time she got her first harp.<\/p>\n

\"\"Whitehurst says she receives two or three requests a week to play and sing at weddings. She takes as many as she can, but her Esprit de Santo schedule sometimes gets in the way (\u201cMost weddings are at 4 or 5 o\u2019clock on a Saturday\u201d).<\/p>\n

And a good percentage, she explains, are on the beach. Whitehurst says she\u2019s one of the few wedding harpists willing to take her delicate instrument on the sand. She has a main harp for \u201cfancy\u201d indoor events, and a more lightweight instrument for the beach.<\/p>\n

She composed All Kinds of Music, over a period of time, as a poem during her teaching years. \u201cI\u2019ve been traveling through my bucket list these days, and this was one of them,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The book ends with several interactive pages \u2013 questions for children\/readers, including \u201cThink about how much music is a part of your daily routine \u2013 what would life be like without any music?\u201d and \u201cWho in your family plays an instrument or enjoys singing?\u201d<\/p>\n

The inclusion was no afterthought. \u201cI thought, I\u2019m going to put all these questions at the end, so all my teacher friends who can\u2019t get a sub that\u2019s musical can at least use this book and have a built-in lesson plan.\u201d<\/p>\n

All Kinds of Music was ultimately created for an audience of five \u2013 Bonnie Whitehurst\u2019s grandchildren. \u201cI just wanted it to be something that my grandchildren had, always,\u201d she explains, \u201cto remind them of me.\u201d<\/p>\n

All Kinds of Music is available, in hardcover or softcover, from St. Petersburg Press<\/a>, Amazon<\/a> and Tombolo Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Gifted with perfect pitch as a young child, Bonnie Whitehurst made music her life, and her career. She…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44215,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-44214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44214\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44215"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}