When the weather is warm—or at least not freezing cold—Chris Johnson spends his lunch hour as often as he can in the large cemetery on East Fifth Street.
He stands alone under an enormous oak tree with branches that hang almost to the ground, virtually cloaking him from sight. He may not be seen, but he’s certainly heard.
Bagpipes are not shy.
Most people don’t know because most people don’t hang out around bagpipes, but they’re loud. Very loud. A single instrument can hit 111 decibels outdoors, slightly louder than a pneumatic drill.
“Somebody said they were loud enough to wake the dead, so maybe I’m not safe playing over there,” Johnson joked as he strolls toward the cemetery one afternoon, his bagpipes tucked away in a pack carried over his shoulder.
Once at the oak tree, Johnson, a senior instructional developer at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, unpacks the instrument, assembles and tunes it, then begins to run through a series of musical pieces. He starts with what’s known as a “quick march medley,” three songs strung together without breaks—”Kilworth Hills,” “The Piper of Longueval” and “The High Road to Gairloch.”
Several other tunes follow, including a go at “The Piper William Morrison’s Welcome to Stirling,” one he hasn’t quite mastered.
“I want to try one that challenges me a little. It’s always good to try those,” said Johnson, who leads seminars and workshops on new lesson-planning tools, the use of software and other creative approaches in the classroom. Teaching the teachers, so to speak.
He started playing bagpipes at 15, but quit when he started college. Now 41 years old, he picked them up again about a year ago.
“To be honest, it’s something that I feel like I’m pretty good at, like I have a natural inclination at it and some technical ability,” he explained. “I felt like it was just kind of wasted, you know? I took these lessons and I got pretty good, then I just stopped.
“I’ve got these pipes sitting in the closet. Why not pull them out and actually improve?”
Despite the decades between, playing them again hasn’t been terribly difficult, he said.
“I think the fact that I started early really helped, so it’s not like starting from scratch. I remember a lot. My fingers remember, so a lot of it’s muscle memory.
“The precision is coming back from practicing. And the lung capacity and lip strength and all those things that go into it, that’s coming back.”
Besides, if he plays horribly, who besides other bagpipe players is going to know, right?
His dad, David, got him interested in the instrument way back when through a deep interest in genealogy, a journey that ventured back to family roots in southern Scotland, Johnson said. When his dad asked if he wanted to learn an instrument that might already be in his DNA, Johnson said, “Sure.”
“I said, ‘If you’ll pay for lessons, I’ll learn. It seems like a cool thing to take on,'” Johnson recalled.
One of the reasons he still plays is in honor of his dad, who died in 2004, he said.
While it might seem inevitable, when he first started playing the instrument, his friends never asked, “Bagpipes? Are you nuts? What’s wrong with you?”
“They thought it was pretty cool,” Johnson said. “I guess it went with my personality. I was always a little bit of an outsider, so I don’t think anybody was totally shocked that that did something weird like that.”
His own sons, 5-year-old David and 2-year-old Oran, are somewhat split on bagpipes, Johnson said. David is not all that interested in the whole thing, but Oran is “pretty obsessed and talks about ‘pipe pipes’ a lot.”
After picking up the bagpipes again, Johnson joined the Chattanooga Pipe Band to make sure he practiced regularly “because I knew I’d never do it on my own, even if I wanted to play.”
The band recently has entered a couple of competitions, something new to Johnson.
“It’s my first time to do that. Even though I started playing when I was young, I’d never competed or anything like that until the last couple of months. That also keeps me going.”
Being among other bagpipers is another draw, he said. It’s not a commonly heard instrument, so there’s a special camaraderie between players.
“It’s a very social instrument. It’s kind of hard to hide practice.”