until after he was an adult, so those moments, when someone in a doing, were really meaningful.” Even as Jake built his musical acumen with lessons and bands outside of school, his GDS High School experience added enriching harmony to the score. He got his feet wet as an educator, developed leadership skills in community engagement, and learned to take ownership of his own narrative.
Storytellers as Educators Each of the teachers Jake recalls the most have added important threads to the stories he weaves with his music today. C.A. Piling’s respectively. Julia, herself an educator, currently serves as Director of Upper Elementary (4–6) and Justice Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) at Echo Horizon School in Culver City, California, while continuing her studies as a doctoral student at USC Rossier Julia taught Middle School history at GDS,
Stability), and served as a co-advisor of conceived, written, performed, and directed by Middle School students.
“She took us to a mountaintop removal site in West Virginia, where against mountaintop removal, even testifying in front of the U.N.” Now with his close musical ties to Appalachia, he spends a lot of time there. “I lean on the ecology elements of that class all the time now in conversation,” he said. Former GDS English teacher Stanley Lau was determined to create a “welcome and rewarding environment for students of color and queer students,” Jake remembered. jon sharp helped shake up Jake’s complacent thinking, exploring a range of ideologies, radical politics, and also Queer Theory, “which wound up being really central to what I would do later in life,” he said. Mike Wenthe’s English class read Beloved and . The study of religious canon, folklore, and Black literature resonated deeply for Jake. Mike, also a musician, knew the medieval folk balladry that Jake was so taken with at the time and played a duet with him in a school talent show. (See Mike’s story about working with Jake in the sidebar on the next page). “I feel like it’s important to do education and performance alongside mid-October 2021 solo appearance at the Kennedy Center. At this apparent crossroads—a moment of increased awareness of historical disparities as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national
an urgency to that now and [it] hasn’t always been respected in the past. I’m presenting this folk music and I have to teach about the folk people to understand the folk music. We all have an obligation to ongoing learning and education.”
Weaving Tales and Traditions Together performed and spoke in Middle School.
Hamilton College in the fall of 2013 and, according to his website,
GEORGETOWN DAYS
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