Joyce Garrett · 1989 Honoree

It is said that no one should undertake a musical career unless they cannot imagine doing anything else. Joyce Garrett humbly admits to such a predisposition when she says, “My whole life, all I’ve known is music.” Although it’s quite obvious that music is the fire that burns in her soul, her true gift relates to the rarely practiced art of becoming instrumental in the futures of young men and women.

It was no accident that there was an old piano in Joyce Garrett’s Kingston, North Carolina home. Gospel music was a sophisticated discipline in her background. Not that sophistication mattered much to a five year old girl “banging” out her all-too-original compositions. With encouragement from perceptive parents, Joyce began lessons at age seven and contined them through her high school years. She attended Bennett College in Greensboro and earned a Master of Music Degree from Catholic university. That myth about music being a singular talent is disproved. In the fact that Joyce was the salutatorian of both her high school and college classes.

In 1965 she came to Washington. “The first time I ever saw Eastern High School, I though it looked like a castle. When the superintendent offered me a job there in 1971, I was in heaven.”

Joyce and her students enjoyed an instant marriage of mutual interest. Although such was “not accepted” in educational circles, Mrs. Garrett nurtured their love of gospel music and made it the overture to a significant learning experience. In eighteen years of arduous work, Joyce Garett has changed the inner city landscape with mountains of hope and oceans of affirmation. Classical music, foreign languages and even more important, lessons of how to “be a doer, not a sitter” are among her specialties. She is the perfect role model, wise beyond her years, humble to a ault and relentless in her tutelage.

Under Joyce Garrett’s direction, the Eastern High School Choir has piled honors upon honors. Their performance credits are staggering: Kennedy Center Open Arts Festival; 25th Anniversary of the March on Washington; Lighting of the National Christmas Tree accompanying Johnny Mathis; Christmas Candlelight Concerts with the renowned Paul Hill Chorale at the Kennedy Center; command performance at the White House for President and Mrs. Reagan; the George Bush Inaugural Youth Forum; and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Ebeneezer Baptist Church, Atlanta. Television appearances include the Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Kurault, and NBC’s Christmas in Washington. Among numerous awards are first places in 1986 and 1987 at the National High School Choir Competition, New York and in July of 1988, a scintillating second place finish at the 17th International Youth and Music Festival in Vienna, Austria. Feature stories on the Eastern Choir will appear in both People Magazine and Reader’s Digest.

On April 30th, Joyce Garrett became a recipient of the Kohl International Teaching Award in Chicago, Illinois.

When asked how she felt when her young people from Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C. won the international award in Austria, Joyce said that all her preaching about hard work came home at that moment for all of them. The highest compliment we can pay Mrs. Garrett is to acknowledge that, thanks in part to Joyce, gospel music has now become accepted as an artform, and the ever precious art of teaching young people is seeking new levels of excellence.