CBC News, Aug 14, 2017
Sweeney, who died Friday at 97, taught her younger brother Oscar Peterson, countless others to play piano
Daisy Sweeney, a pillar of Montreal’s black community who taught her younger brother, jazz great Oscar Peterson how to play piano, has died at the age of 97.
Oscar Peterson
Sweeney was a legend in her own right in her hometown, teaching countless local kids to play piano and founding the Montreal Black Community Youth Choir with Trevor Payne. The choir went on to become the internationally celebrated Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir.
“She worked her way through adversity and demanded that of everyone who ever sat on her piano bench,” her daughter Sylvia Sweeney told CBC Montreal’s Daybreak Monday.
Sweeney was born Daisy Elitha Peterson in 1920 in Montreal’s Saint-Henri neighbourhood, the daughter of a father who worked on the railway and a housekeeper mother.
With few options open to her as a young black woman, Sweeney followed in her mother’s footsteps and performed domestic work to pay her way through McGill University, where she studied music.
“She told me at one time that while she was going to university, instead of being rewarded for that, her employer fired her, saying she didn’t need to have a maid educated to scrub her toilets.”
Sweeney aspired to a career as a classical pianist, but eventually settled into teaching piano.
Teacher who helped break colour barriers
She is best known for setting her younger brother Oscar Peterson as well as Oliver Jones on their paths to jazz greatness, but Sweeney also influenced generations of black Montrealers as a teacher at the city’s Negro Community Centre, where she taught for nearly 40 years.
Oliver Jones
“She would put anyone who had a will through rigour and ended up marching a lot of students up Atwater Avenue to McGill for their preparatorial exams,” Sylvia Sweeney said.
“She broke colour barriers through exceeding expectations, and she expected that of her students, of her children and of her community.”
Sweeney said her mother helped broaden acceptance of black Montrealers, and the options available to them, by the example that she and her students set.
“When you see a child who’s black sitting at a piano playing classical music and playing it with proficiency, and doing that over time, it starts to normalize the visual,” Sylvia Sweeney said.
By the time she reached McGill University on a scholarship, Sylvia Sweeney said she felt like it was a totally natural thing to do.
“I walked into McGill from high school and I felt like I belonged,” she said. “Those are the quiet legacies she left in her wake.”
“She worked through very tough times without ever feeling like they were tough.”
Source : CBC