Most famous players are introduced to music as children. A piano in the living room, a school band, a relative who owns a guitar: these are the usual starting points. The six musicians below began later, at an age when most people have already settled on other careers.
Their ages and circumstances differ, and the sources don’t always agree on exact details. Where they differ, the text says so.
Bill Withers
Withers joined the Navy at 17 and spent nine years in the service as an aircraft mechanic. After his discharge he moved to Los Angeles, worked at an aircraft parts factory, bought a guitar at a pawn shop and recorded demos of his songs. He had never played the guitar before, and he began teaching himself.
Accounts of his age at the time vary. One profile says Withers was in his late twenties, while another says he was thirty years old before he first picked up a guitar. Either way, at 32 he became an overnight success with his debut album, Just As I Am, thanks to the hit “Ain’t No Sunshine.”
Rhiannon Giddens
Giddens came to string music through a classical route. She studied opera at Oberlin College, then returned to North Carolina and learned to play banjo and bluegrass fiddle. In a 2024 AARP interview, she said she started playing fiddle and banjo when she was 23 or 24, and now she makes a living with it.
A turning point came in 2005 at the Black Banjo Gathering in Boone, North Carolina. The Carolina Chocolate Drops formed after Dom Flemons, Giddens and Justin Robinson attended it, and the band marked its twentieth anniversary in 2025. She now plays banjo, violin/fiddle and viola.
Ryo Fukui
Ryo Fukui was a Japanese jazz pianist from Hokkaido. He only started learning piano at 22, after moving to Tokyo from his hometown. That is a late start for a jazz musician, since the genre demands years of technical and harmonic study.
Equipboard lists him among its notable pianists who started late, alongside several others. For anyone who assumes the keyboard has to be a childhood habit, his path is a useful counterexample.
Red Garland
Red Garland is remembered as a pianist, though piano wasn’t his first instrument. He is hailed as one of the most influential jazz pianists of the 1950s, but he began with saxophone and clarinet and only learned piano at 18.
At 18, he was technically starting as a new student on his main instrument. His case is a little different from the others here, since he already had musical training on other instruments before piano.
Jon Jang
Jon Jang is a jazz pianist and composer who took an unusual route into music. He learned to play piano at 19, after dropping out of UC Berkeley to study with a neighborhood piano teacher.
His commitment shows in how he went about it. He bought his first piano at 20. He had left a university to study with a local teacher, so the instrument became his main focus from the start.
Glenn Tipton
Glenn Tipton is best known as a guitarist with Judas Priest. He learned piano from his mother at an early age, but didn’t start playing guitar until he was 19. So he had some musical grounding, but not on the instrument that made his name.
His way in was fairly ordinary. His brother played guitar, and Tipton said he would sneak into his brother’s room to play it when his brother was out.
