S1 Ep007 How Music Makes a Different Business: Chelsie Henderson of Rural Soul Music Studio, Pt1
Entrepreneur and small business owner Chelsie Henderson of Rural Soul Music Studio explains how she developed a values-driven, collaborative business in her rural home region and shares:
What her first years as a public school teacher looked like.
How teacher burnout led her to pursue community-based work.
Why collaboration is the key to the grassroots, experimental approach she has developed in her music business.
The values and practices that allow her to build a one-of-a-kind creative business.
Bio:
Chelsie Henderson is the founder and a music instructor at Rural Soul Music Studio, and proprietor of EarthBeat Music Shop. She has been teaching piano, voice, ukulele and guitar lessons for over 15 years, and in more recent years has been sharing her love for West African drumming and movement with all ages and abilities. Chelsie has taught in a multitude of education settings, from schools to libraries to senior citizen centers. She has had the very good fortune of working with many different peoples, from babies to the aging population: children and adults with special needs, adults with Alzheimers and Dementia, adults struggling with substance abuse or homelessness, and on. With her gentle teaching style, she strives to make everyone feel at home with the drum from the moment they begin and equally enjoys learning from these students.
Drums are among the world's oldest musical instruments. Drumming today has been scientifically proven to benefit the body and mind by reducing tension, anxiety, depression, and stress; boosting the immune system and increasing energy; helping to control chronic pain; releasing negative feelings and emotional trauma; improving joint mobility and motor skills; and building social interactions and community.
“Rural Soul, to me, has always been a magical experiment, from self-education and entrepreneurship, by researching and doing, and community collaborations by researching and doing, all the while being guided by an openness to possibility. And, frankly, magic! To me, music is magic.”
Transcript
Season 1, Episode 7 (Part 1) : How Music Makes a Different Business: Chelsie Henderson of Rural Soul Music Studio
[Moribayassa djembe drumming track featuring master drummer and soloist M’Bemba Bangoura, Chelsie Henderson, and Wayne White]
Chelsie Henderson, Guest:
Rural Soul, to me, has always been a magical experiment, from self-education and entrepreneurship by researching and doing, and community collaborations by researching and doing, all the while being guided by an openness to possibility. And, frankly, magic! To me, music is magic. And remaining open to the concept that we can all be students for life. This is what's kept me motivated, inspired, and engaged all this time.
[Rhythmic sounds of electric train pulling into station]
[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]
Cevan Castle, Host:
Welcome to ‘Towards a Kinderpublic’, a podcast exploring issues in public space, and ways to design kinder space that better meets our interconnected needs. I’m Cevan Castle, and along with Annie Chen, we are Kinderpublic.
Today’s episode is “How Music Makes a Different Business: Chelsie Henderson of Rural Soul Music Studio”
This episode opened with the music of master drummer M’Bemba Bangoura, who is playing alongside Chelsie Henderson and Wayne White. You’ll hear more about this later, and also in the next episode. The rest of the track will play at the end of this discussion.
This episode will resonate with listeners who have embarked on creative careers, and especially those who are teaching in creative fields, with the intention of also maintaining a professional and creative practice. You may recognize some of your path in our discussion!
From an architectural, and spatial perspective, this is also a really interesting discussion about a business with walls and also no walls; a business that is centering and also reaching; pulling a rural community together through ideas, and ultimately, having an impact on people across the world. This, to me, parallels the musical conditions of practicing and playing, of being in a concentrated space, and being in a performance space, and most of all, of being really good at communicating what is essential.
Chelsie Henderson is the accomplished musician and teacher, and amazing entrepreneur, behind Rural Soul Music Studio, a woman-owned, anti-racist, vibrant music space in the historic Main Street business district of Schuylerville, New York. Schuylerville is a predominantly rural area upstate, about an hour north of Albany.
Chelsie shares very honestly about her background in Music Education and early career experiences, and how teacher burnout in a school setting helped her turn toward her dream to build a community music center in her home region, and to develop a collaborative, experimental approach to running a business.
It’s not an overstatement to say that Rural Soul Music Studio is iconic in the area.
The studio is a really recognizable and distinct space, in part, because of its location in the beautiful Bullard Block building, built in 1881, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. The Bullard Block is home to other creative and small businesses, also, and this grouping inherently stands out in a business district and makes one curious to learn more.
It’s also the colorful, welcoming interior of the music studio itself, and the ample amounts of natural light pouring in from the large facade windows. This is a creative space that is modeling quality without needing to label it, in a community of people who are working on working together, on everything from regional economic development, to climate change.
Rural Soul is also noteworthy because you are just as likely to find a class or an event that Chelsie is holding somewhere outside of the beautiful main street business space. It might be outdoors, it might be in a library, it could be anywhere. And those events are just as recognizable.
In Part 1 of our conversation, Chelsie shares how her approach to business means a listening relationship with the community around her, and why, at Rural Soul, you may find something that you did not know you were looking for.
[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]
Cevan, opening interview:
Thank you so much for joining us this morning. I'm so excited to talk to you and learn more about you and your business. Could you share some of your professional background, the story of how the Rural Soul Music Studio came to be, and where your business is located?
Chelsie Henderson:
Sure. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, so it's fun to remind myself where it all started. I have a bachelor's degree in Music Education, with a Vocal concentration, and a minor in Special Education from UVM in Burlington. And my first full-time teaching gig was as a high school level choral instructor at a rural, northern Vermont public school.
At the time, I was also a conducting intern with an ensemble called the Bella Voce Women's Chorus of Vermont, and was serving as Choral Chair of the Vermont Chapter of M.E.N.C. [now known as NAfME], which is the National Association of Music Education. And I was the Operations Assistant for the Vermont Youth Orchestra Association. And during that time, was also a camp counselor for the Vermont Youth Orchestra's Summer Camp program. And one summer, was a Resident Director for the Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival. And then amidst all that, I would teach private piano and vocal lessons.
So, my background really was in classical voice in choral music, and I thought I was on this grand path to becoming a professional choral director. So my main task at my first teaching job at the Vermont school was to reinvent a choral program that had been stagnant for many years and also to jumpstart other programming. The school was basically wide open to my ideas, which was really a brilliant way to start my teaching career.
So I started the school's first ever group guitar class. I helped to create a group piano class and a music theory class at that time. And then I was also thrown in as a theater co-director for a year.
And then halfway through my first year of teaching, the middle school music teacher left her job for personal health reasons. And then I was all of a sudden just thrown into general music teacher for grades four through eight. Again, this is my first year teaching, and so my teaching percentage went from like a three quarter time, 75% teacher, to over 100%. So, needless to say, at that time, I reached what I can now prescribe as burnout at the end of my first full teaching year.
And then I gave it my all for a second year. And then it was at that time, that I was starting to realize I was reaching that burnout and that there were other avenues for teaching. And that this one really wasn't working for me. I felt like my… I have this overactive creative mind… and, although the school was very supportive of the new programming, there were a lot of other ideas that were always swimming around that I really wanted to try on a community level.
And then other, you know- the real work of being a music teacher in a public school was also not really aligning with me. The paperwork, the meetings, and this. The part where I actually create musical opportunities and share music is never what I would actually describe as W. O. R. K.
I wanted just to highlight that, because that really is the beginning for me as a music teacher. But then just going on this path of community collaboration, I feel like the burnout actually sort of pushed me in that direction.
So I'll fast forward a few years and I decided to move back to this area, which is my hometown region. And, really came back with this energy to try and start a community music center, which at the time, there wasn't anything like that in Washington County, where private lessons were offered on many different instruments.
So, it was in that time and when I'm trying to figure this out, that I accidentally reunited with an acquaintance I hadn't seen since preschool. So this is over 20 years in the past. And it turned out we both had a desire to teach private music lessons in the area. Katie Svatek is her name, and she had just returned to the area with a master's in Music from the University of Michigan with French Horn as her primary instrument.
So I was beyond excited to re-meet her and discover these uncanny past and present conditions. So we basically decided on the spot that we were going to co-found a music education space. And within the very walls of where we were having this reunion and inventing this idea is where we ended up setting up shop. So talk about manifestation, right? <laughing>
Cevan:
Yeah!
Chelsie Henderson:
So the beautiful 70 Main Street in Greenwich, in Washington County, which is about 10 minutes east of Schuylerville, is where we decided to set up our first space. And really it just took a quick conversation with the building owners who at the time were Zaidee Bliss, who's a very gifted yoga instructor, and John Shoemaker, Zaidee's husband. He's a wonderful songwriter and meditation coach. And they were immediately invested in our idea and happened to have a space that was going to be newly opening. So we became their tenants. And 70 Main was also host to a number of community events over those years from listening room concerts to open mics to summer camps. So it was a perfect fit for our collaborative attitude and being new entrepreneurs as well as relatively new music teachers. So that's where it started.
The name Rural Soul Music Studio came in that time before the actual music space was opened, before I met Katie, I had just moved back to the area, and I had kind of come up with a stage name for all the creative community efforts that I was organizing with other local artists. It seemed to exactly encompass the grassroots gritty energy that we were harnessing. And I came up with the tagline, ‘encouraging the creative soul of our rural haven,’ just trying to pull people out of the woodwork with all their creative talents.
Yeah! And so we opened that first space, and more enthusiastic music instructors came through the door. And then a year after planting that seed in Greenwich, my dear, dear friend Eric Laffer shared with me that a space in the same building that houses his Laffer Gallery, the very prominent historic Bullard Block in Schuylerville, was going to be opening. So the owners of the block, called Old Schuylerville Ventures Inc., prided themselves in the preservation of this National Historic Registry building, as well as providing a supportive space for local artists. That's really what that building is, the foundation of that building is. And because of the low overhead and the interest in making a collaborative art space with a local art instructor named Sarah Dockerty- her business was called Busy Bee's Art Studio- and then all of the community encouragement, we were able to open a second studio space in the newly vacated 90 Broad Street in the Bullard Block. And a year after opening the second space, we said goodbye to our beloved 70 Main Street and made Schuylerville the hub for all of our activities.
Three years ago in the thick of the pandemic, I added EarthBeat Music Shop to the studio with a main focus of making fairly traded, handcrafted West African percussion instruments more accessible to the community. So I sell djembes, dunduns, krin, which are log drums, and other accessories from a company called Wula Drum that's based out of New York City. And everything is handcrafted in Guinea, West Africa. So my partner, Wayne White, is a very accomplished hand drum repair technician. His side business is called the Djembe Lab. And he is my primary connection to Wula Drum, which we can talk about later. And his lab is in the basement below the studio.
Cevan:
That's great. I am a proud owner of a Wula drum, thanks to you <laugh>, bought during the pandemic <laugh>, which you helped me get through. So, thank you again, <laugh>. I'll never thank you enough for that.
Chelsie Henderson:
Well thank you. And I, yeah, I hope it's getting a lot of playtime still. It is such a therapeutic instrument to have.
Cevan:
Very therapeutic. It is.
I'm very interested, just as an aside, to know about the background of that building. And I would like to comment that you can sure see the vision of the owners of that building, by the tenants that they have there, and the character, and the sort of energy around that building. So, I love to know about them. Thanks for mentioning that.
Chelsie Henderson:
Yes, absolutely. And there is a lot of information on the building in the National Historic Registry, as I mentioned, and there was a wonderful article written about the building and the owners a few years ago in a local publication. I'll make sure to share with you.
Cevan:
Thanks so much.
I'm going to ask you about services your business offers. And you've already touched on this a little bit, but I want to break it down carefully because this is such a layered and interesting thing at Rural Soul. So I'll ask you in three parts.
The first part is to ask, since you moved into your new hub in Schuylerville, not so new, but, since the business has evolved and is now located in Schuylerville, can you briefly share what services your business literally offers?
Chelsie Henderson:
Yes. So this should be an easy question. As I enter now 12 years of teaching in the region and 10 years in the Schuylerville studio, but I still have a hard time honestly narrowing it down as the studio continues evolving, and stretching, I like to say.
So we currently offer private and micro-group music lessons on guitar, electric bass, piano, voice, and all western band instruments. So that would be your woodwinds, brass, classical percussion, drum set, and West African hand percussion. So that is with several different teachers who have rotating schedules in the studio.
I personally teach ukulele, piano, and voice lessons. And then I also host ukulele meetups that benefit local nonprofits. For example, last month we donated to S.A.F.E.R., our regional food bank. And this month we'll be donating to Hudson Crossing Park. And I also teach weekly large group adult traditional West African inspired drumming classes at the studio. So that can be online or in person, currently I'm doing in-person classes. And occasional pop-up workshops or class series at local libraries and senior living centers. I facilitate drum circles here, there and everywhere. And also offer school residencies.
And I also volunteer host, and organize teaching and performing tours for masters of West African music traditions in the Capital Region. That's a very, very important part of that for me.
Cevan:
So there may be some overlaps here, but this is the second part of the question about what your business does:
You have a magical business model and approach. Rural Soul seems to be, on the one hand, a really straightforward business- you're a music studio.
And on the other hand, it's not straightforward at all. You aren't afraid to iterate and experiment. You've had, as far as I'm aware, and there is probably a lot that I don't know about, a small library of books about racism and healing from racist beliefs, a pop-up instrument store, which is now permanent, a highly varied set of locations where you have offered classes and meetups or provided programming to other initiatives. And you have had a range of class format formats, from in-person, to online, to outdoors.
Can you talk about the way that Rural Soul reaches into neighborhoods and conversations beyond the studio, and why that is part of your approach? Is there a key to your ability to identify opportunities and partnerships that align with your business? And how are you able to be so adaptive and develop new opportunities so quickly?
Chelsie Henderson:
Wow. Yes. So, really getting to the core of it all.
I love how you said ‘magical’ and ‘experiment’ when you're describing the studio. Rural Soul, to me, has always been a magical experiment, from self-education and entrepreneurship, by researching and doing, and community collaborations by researching and doing, all the while being guided by an openness to possibility. And, frankly, magic! To me, music is magic.
And remaining open to the concept that we can all be students for life. This is what's kept me motivated, inspired, and engaged all this time.
So I depend largely on partnerships, and really make myself available to partnerships from small local libraries, to local parks like Hudson Crossing, to larger nonprofits in the arts, such as Saratoga Performing Arts Center or SPAC. I really do keep myself accessible to collaboration. And while I do love having absolute creative freedom to offer whatever musical workshops and events that I desire, I also find it of utmost importance to listen to what the community wants.
And, just as an aside, the word ‘listen’ has been really important to me. And I actually at one point even considered changing the studio name to ‘listen,’ to emphasize that point of, if we all really listen to each other and respond collaboratively, just how beautiful life can be.
So, empathy and appreciation are really my pillars.
Hence my anti-racist children's book reading corner, which you had mentioned. This started as a collaboration with Battenkill Books, where I sold these books on consignment and gave my sales commission to Boston University's Center for Anti-Racist Research. And then over time I ended up just turning it into a permanent reading collection at the studio for my students and other studio visitors to enjoy. And many days I'll walk into the studio or come around the corner, we have this little vestibule waiting area, and they'll be an adult sitting there reading the children's books. But- furthering my education and connections with people in places that facilitate conversations and activities around anti-racism.
Hence also my drive to reinvigorate our local Climate Smart group, which had started in 2018-2019. But, you know, pushing for environmental sustainability and justice in Schuylerville and our region.
And hence my passion for honoring and uplifting the elders, the culture bearers of the music that I study and share, and who I do my best to support through community engagement.
And I mentioned having an overactive creative mind, I'll just call it an active creative mind now. So I'm not demeaning it, but by listening to it and being able to reflect my ideas off of other creatives around me and listening to their ideas, all while staying grounded as can be through practicing self-care, I can push forward confidently with the belief that all people are artists, you know, while also being rooted in the present so that I can keep the vessel open to inspiration, or some people may say to let the muse in. So overall, my goal is always to hold a safe space for musical learning and creative exploration. And that includes for myself.
[Sounds only for a few seconds, then fade into background]
Cevan:
Subscribe to Towards a Kinder Public on Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and a review, we would love your feedback. To share information about issues in public space, and spaces that are doing things right, email podcast@kinderpublic.com.
Links to more information about the guests and topics mentioned, as well as a full transcript of the conversation, are available on the podcast section of our website, kinderpublic.com. Visit our website to learn more about our work.
I’m Cevan Castle, our guest has been Chelsie Henderson of Rural Soul Music Studio and EarthBeat Drum Shop.
And now, enjoy listening to master drummer MBemba Bangoura, Chelsie Henderson, and Wayne White!
[Moribayassa djembe drumming track featuring master drummer and soloist MBemba Bangoura, Chelsie Henderson, and Wayne White]
Mentioned in this episode:
Rural Soul Music Studio & EarthBeat Music Shop
Wula Profile: M'Bemba Bangoura - Wula Drum
School of the Arts: Program in Music | The University of Vermont
University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance
Bella Voce Women's Chorus of Vermont
Vermont Youth Orchestra Association
Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival
Bullard Block - National Archives Catalog Entry
Saratoga Performing Arts Center | Saratoga Performing Arts Center (spac.org)
Boston University Center for Antiracist Research
New York Climate Smart Communities