Street Music Week busker posts a song a day online to raise money for food bank

If Street Music Week was proceeding as usual this year, Heather Montgomery might have had to bring a busload of middle schoolers along with her to a downtown street corner. So perhaps it’s best the 2020 event has gone online.

Montgomery is an orchestra teacher at Sacajawea Middle School and Grant and Roosevelt elementary schools in Spokane. In the pre-pandemic world, her days were filled with music. But since the COVID-19 shutdown began, she’s had a little more free time than usual, outside of Zoom staff meetings, grading student recital videos and wrangling a toddler at home. She’s still filling her days with music, only remotely now.

For nearly 100 days, Montgomery has uploaded a song a day to her Facebook page, accompanying her singing with a simple acoustic guitar. She grew up with a mom who was also a music teacher, who encouraged her growth as a musician. She played fiddle and sang in local band Folkinception, now known as Trego, for seven years. Despite her long musical resume, a song a day is a sort of self-challenge: She wanted to polish her guitar skills and learn a few – or 100 – new songs while she was at it.

“It’s kind of something I always wanted to do, a new song every day,” Montgomery said. “But I was always too self-conscious to actually do it. At the beginning of quarantine, I just said, ‘Screw it, I’m gonna do it.’”

For most of quarantine, Montgomery’s audience was largely her friends and family. She did some duets with her mom and with a choir teacher from her school. But it was mostly for herself until old friend Carey Eyer, a longtime Street Music Week busker, told Montgomery about the event. He suggested she keep doing what she was doing, but add a link to donations for Spokane’s Second Harvest food bank along with each song.

“Being stuck at home has given me a lot of time to think about what actually matters,” Montgomery said. “And people are relying on food banks more than ever now, so I’m happy to do what I can.”

Though Montgomery said she could probably play nearly any instrument “at a fifth-grade level given about 30 minutes,” most of her Facebook videos have featured guitar.

She’s done a lot of comfort-food musical classics with sentimental value from when she was a child, including her father’s favorite the Beatles, and plenty of Paul Simon.

Her favorite so far has been Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” but a close second was her multitrack, multi-instrument version of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper.” Montgomery spent an entire day playing all the parts herself, even rendering the iconic saxophone solo on an obscure Japanese electronic instrument called the Otamatone.

At home, Montgomery typically records her daily video while her 3-year-old is taking a nap. A lot of the time, she doesn’t settle on what the day’s song will be until late afternoon. She’s only missed a couple of days since quarantine’s start, a feat she’s proud of. Beyond being a way to raise morale and funds for a good cause, Montgomery said the daily videos provide some encouragement to “make herself presentable” while she works from home.

She’s been teaching remotely as best she can, though teaching kids to play the tuba over Zoom is not ideal.

Next year, when it is hoped things will be back to normal for Street Music Week, Montgomery said she’d love to participate in the flesh. But school doesn’t get out till mid-June, so she may have to bring along a middle school orchestra as her accompaniment.

“I realize I’m so lucky to have the privilege of having time for reflection and pause, but I miss my students a lot,” Montgomery said.

“There’s a lot of unknowns, but I’m hoping to be back to being a teacher in an actual building full time before long.”