As a kid, Rob Sarche didn’t care much about playing the piano or practicing for his teacher, Peggy Smith.
One day he asked his mother, “Can’t we just go visit Peggy, and you can pay her?”
Services for Smith, who died Feb. 2 after a short battle with lymphoma, will be March 5 at 2 p.m. at Wellshire Presbyterian Church, 2999 S. Colorado Blvd.
“She was indomitable but had a core of softness and a steel belief that humanity was good,” said Rob’s mother, Carol Sarche.
Rob Sarche’s feelings about Smith seem universal among hundreds of students she taught over decades.
“To Peggy, communication was as important as the lesson,” said a student, Esther Gross of Denver.
“She connected with everyone, 100 percent,” said her massage therapist, Elizabeth Vincent. “She had a beautiful spirit.”
“She never just gave a piano lesson,” said her son Paul Sorey of Seattle.
Most students shared the experience of confessing they hadn’t practiced the past week, including this writer, a former student.
“She was so accepting. She’d say, ‘Well, you can practice here,’ ” recalled Cindy Hinds of Denver, who took lessons for years.
Smith was always game to change music if a student wanted something different.
“She hooked me up with a jazz teacher, and that opened a whole new world,” said her son David Sorey of Seattle.
Smith, at 5-foot-4 and just over 100 pounds, was perky, warm, gentle and sympathetic, friends said, but she also was persistent and determined, said Butch Pritchett, a longtime friend.
“She was not as delicate and fragile as she sometimes thought herself to be,” Paul Sorey said.
Though she caught every mistake her students made, she told them not to worry “because I can hear what’s between the mistakes too,” Gross said.
Smith climbed all of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks, helped her husband, George Smith, run and teach dance at the Outpost Club, which groups rent to dance and for dancing lessons. There wasn’t a dance she couldn’t do, Pritchett said.
Smith was a huge believer in music as therapy, knowing that people who had suffered brain trauma could often still play the piano even if they couldn’t talk or write.
“I think music comes from a special place in the brain,” she told students.
Her piano students were countless — sometimes members of three generations of the same family. Carol Sarche, her three sons, daughter and a grandson have taken lessons.
Adult students had an annual recital/potluck event at her home, where she had a room with two Steinways. Smith did her best to calm the students, most of whom feared the recital as if they were going to play at Carnegie Hall.
Peggy Parrott was born in Oklahoma City on Sept. 2, 1931, and earned a music degree at the University of Oklahoma.
She was married to Stewart Sorey, and they had two sons. They later divorced. She married George Smith in 1989.
In addition to him and her sons, she is survived by three grandchildren and four stepsons: Flint Smith of Carbondale, Quade Smith of Denver, Cody Smith of New York and Denver, and Tyle Smith of Denver. She was preceded in death by her brother, Donald Parrot in 1989, and by her daughter, Anne Sorey, who died when she was 6.
Paid obituaries.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
