Janet Peck
When Janet Peck was in kindergarten, she was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. She replied, “an artist and a musician.” Both wishes came true.
By age 10, Peck was singing and playing guitar in a trio with her sisters in Ollie, Iowa. She had opportunities to become a professional musician, but she turned them down in favor of raising her family. Today, at the age of 82, Peck still gives the occasional singing performance for her neighbors at Emporia Presbyterian Manor, accompanied by her digital QChord, a handheld electronic instrument. “When people enjoy my music, it just makes me feel better,” Peck said.
Singing and acting were Peck’s great loves as a child and teenager, and she also learned oil painting. Most of her seven older siblings sang or played instruments, too. She remembers the day her brother brought home a guitar and showed her a few chords.
Soon after, Peck and her sisters were singing and playing on the porch when a woman from their church drove up the lane to their farm. “She said, ‘You girls are going to be in the Ollie Big Days,” the town’s annual festival. At their first performance, she said, “We did our two songs and they clapped us back for a third.”
As a young adult, Peck took singing lessons with a teacher who wanted to take her to California to sing professionally. But Peck declined. “I’m a country girl. I don’t think I could have adjusted at all,” she said.
Peck became a schoolteacher, a wife, and a mother to three sons instead. And she made a promise to herself and to God: if He wanted her to sing, she would, with His help. But she would never take money for it. Peck preferred to entertain at nursing homes or serve as a church musician. While living in Texas, her favorite thing was to join the old country music jam sessions that took place in many town parks.
Texas is where she learned to yodel, too — a talent she took as far as an audition for “Hee Haw.” In the end, she turned them down, too. Her satisfaction has always come from knowing she had entertained someone, even for a little while.
“It was just nice to know they wanted me,” she said.
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