LOCAL Houston | The City Guide FEBRUARY 2015 | Page 46

Local February 2015 final.qxp_002houston 1/26/15 1:57 PM Page 46

SHAWN PARKS
Bojangles Music School

SINCE 2007, BOJANGLES MUSIC SCHOOL HAS OPERATED AS A FLOATING NETWORK OF INSTRUCTORS GIVING PRIVATE LESSONS ALL OVER
HOUSTON, BUT NOW FOUNDER SHAWN PARKS HAS OPENED A
BONA FIDE MUSIC SCHOOL RIGHT ABOVE THE STALWART ROCKIN’
ROBIN GUITARS AND MUSIC ON SOUTH SHEPHERD, WITH OLD SEATS
FROM THE ASTRODOME IN THE WAITING ROOM AND EACH PRACTICE
ROOM NAMED AFTER A LEGENDARY TEXAS-BORN GUITARIST.
Of all the people you named the rooms after, who has been the most
unknown entity to the students?
Probably Johnny Winter. Not a lot of them know who Johnny Winter is, or
Lightnin’, which kills me. Go home and listen to Lightnin’ Hopkins, man!
Are kids going home and looking him up?
Oh, yeah. It’s great, man. They come in and they wanna learn a Lightnin’
Hopkins song, which we’ve got to clear with their parents lyrically before we
teach it to ’em! But that’s a good problem to have.
It’s interesting, because Lightnin’s songs were just a few chords, but the way
he plucked around on the guitar was very sophisticated, so you’re almost
teaching kids to improvise in a way, right?
It’s like anything – you gotta learn the rules and follow them until you can
break them. Music’s that way, and Lightnin’ was the king of that, playing a little out of time, a little out of tune, but it just worked. It was just magic. And a
lot of the stuff that he wrote is so metaphorical that kids understand it on the
face value end, but to me, if they keep these songs with them, later on they’ll
get the deeper meaning – a lot of times, a sexual meaning – behind a lot of
the stuff that he wrote, and that stuff will be valid later on in their lives.
It’s all an investment in their futures.
That’s it. I’m [