The way Joshua Walker figures it, it’s a good thing that when one of his ancestors – on his mom’s side – first sailed to the U.S. as a stowaway on a ship, he wasn’t carrying a viola.
“He came with only one thing, and that was a guitar,’’ Walker said, who teaches guitar at George Mason. Who knows, maybe it was that guitar that ultimately influenced Walker to become a guitarist himself.
One thing is for sure, Walker comes with more than just a guitar, he comes with a song that he’s just beginning to write: the rest of his life.
Walker isn’t the plain guy you see walk into GM, guitar in hand, to teach his only Mason class, the block six guitar elective. Walker also strums his life to a completely different beat. Just last week, Walker had five gigs. Weddings, wineries, and concerts are all part of his daily life. Walker is the guitarist in an orchestra called Bohemian Caverns Jazz who played at a venue in Washington D.C. every Monday night for the past five years. It doesn’t end here.
Walker has been playing guitar for 28 years now, but it all started at age 12.
“There was a band called Poison and a guitarist named C.C. DeVille and I really wanted to be like him,” Walker said.
Poison went on to sell 50 million albums worldwide and record six Top Ten singles. Nevermind that Walker is still waiting for his first. He’ll get there, too, even if it’s via academics.
It wasn’t until the age of 19 that Walker sought a career in teaching chords and strumming patterns. Walker was just like any other kid: washing dishes, delivering pizza, scraping together bits of money to buy college textbooks. But after a local music store announced an opening for a new guitar teacher, he realized he might have just washed his last dish. Walker’s social and determined personality was just the right fit for a career in teaching.
I’m no guitar wiz myself, but like many, playing guitar seems pretty cool to me. I even bought one once. I paid $200 at Fox’s Music for it to sit in my closet, resting against my box off stuffed animals. Alas, neither have been touched in years.
Unlike me, Walker has not only picked up his guitar, but he also teaches with it. Why would anyone teach if you could be playing at rock concerts and earning applause from screaming fans? So, I asked him.
“Well, because I would probably starve,” Walker said.
Making a living solely off of playing is pretty much impossible. Venues don’t pay you much unless you’re Eric Clapton or Slash. So, despite the many concerts Walker plays, the income made from teaching was the stability he needed to make a living off of his musical talent.
This past January, Walker started teaching guitar at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, one day every other week. From his house in Dumfries, Virginia, the two hour commute seems pretty unbearable. Luckily, he teaches much more frequently at the Levine School of Music in D.C. There, he teaches five days a week focusing his time on private one-on-one work.
Despite his busy life balancing teaching at three schools and completing private sessions with students, he still has competition. His competition, however, is very nebulous: it’s YouTube. This is where many people with big dreams and tiny budgets go to learn guitar. But Walker has discovered, to his good fortune, that for many young people YouTube is a pretty lousy place to learn guitar.
“It is not hard attracting students because guitar is one of the more popular instruments that people want to learn. I have a number of adult students too, it’s just hard to get them to start with the basics,” Walker said. “Students come in thinking they can do whatever they want. On the first day. I make the point of saying that that’s not how it is.”
Walker’s ratio of playing to teaching is about 4:6. But when he is performing, Walker’s range of instrumental talent is unmeasurable. Growing up, classical guitar playing was not so popular. As contemporary music gained prevalence, Walker learned to play both acoustic and electric guitar. Although less applicable to Walker’s daily life, he also plays Bass and Mandolin guitar.
The only thing missing from all these instruments and songs are lyrics. Walker may not label himself as a singer, but Walker is versatile and if need be, he will sing per request. Musical notes are universal, from singing to playing, and so is the promoting and selling of music.
“The Muse” is the name of one of the songs on his CD he recorded in 2007. From track to track, Walker shares his self written songs that feature guitar playing, bass, drums, and a bit of saxophone. However, since 2007, music has changed the tune it hums to.
“[Buying music] may be a dying industry with Pandora so there is very little money to be made with selling your own music, but I still try to record and sell on iTunes,” Walker said.
Perhaps it’s not music, but everyone has something they can turn into a profession, says Walker. The key, of course, is to find it and then develop it.
“I see a lot of adult students that have stable jobs, but end up not being happy. If you can help them find something that they love to do and they get really good at it, they can turn it into their career,” Walker said.
For GM students who think they’d like to give guitar a whirl, it’s an elective — just like theater or art or photography — that you can sign up for online. If enough students sign up, maybe you’ll see Walker around school outside of sixth block.
“Mr. Walker is more than a teacher. He is a mentor that has taught me to express myself through a musical medium I didn’t know before,” freshman, guitar student, Daniella Valderrama said.
Of course, there are some moments in everyone’s career that stand out as humiliating. For Walker, it was when he was playing at a live rock concert and, for the first time, the strap came off his guitar and, yes, his guitar fell, crashing to the ground.
“That was pretty embarrassing,” he said.
Even more embarrassing, no one noticed.
