Jonathan Brown

When I was a kid, my dad would often take me to the movies. For a time my favorite genre was the Western. One thing that grabbed my attention was that in several saloon scenes there’d either be a sign that read ‘Don’t shoot the piano player,’ or at the end of a shootout, the piano player would hold his hands up in surrender and say, “Don’t shoot me, I’m just the piano player!” And often the bad guy would give the musician a reprieve.