Julie King

Full Name: Juliet Mary King

Profession: Founder/owner/manager, Julie's Music

Birth date: April 29, 1960 in Ann Arbor, MI

Favorite composers: Ravel, Rachmaninoff

 

Julie King is the founder and owner of Julie's Music, which opened in 2006. Born in Ann Arbor, she was one year old when her father Richard opened up King's Keyboard House. As a little girl, Julie would go to the shop on Saturdays. She recalls spending the night with her grandparents on Friday and getting dropped off at the shop in the morning to spend the day there.

Julie started taking piano lessons in the King's Keyboard studio when she was five years old, using the Thompson method. Initially, her father taught her, but by the fourth grade she was traveling to the home of a private teacher, by then using the Fletcher method. In high school she was once again taking lessons at her father's studio, again with a private instructor. While she was classically trained, she played popular music by ear, often dissatisfied when a Beatles song on the radio sounded different than the music she played when reading from Beatles sheet music. She studied the piano pretty seriously, she says. She went to summer music camps at Oakland University, and participated in National Guild Auditions for three years. As a teenager, she also occasionally worked behind the counter at her father's store.

Julie graduated from Pioneer High School in 1978. She went to college at Western Michigan University, discontinuing her piano studies to focus on dance. She had done ballet as a child, and took modern dance in high school. In college, she took both ballet and modern/improvisational dance. She also studied psychology, thinking about pursuing a career in dance therapy. Dance injuries, however, prevented her from graduating from Western.

At twenty-two, Julie didn't know what she wanted to do. So she returned to Ann Arbor and started working for her father at King's Keyboard House. She grew to like working at the shop, and soon she was in charge of the entire sheet music department. She took some business classes, and in 1983 started working full time for the family business.

It was that year, 1983, that the King's decided to expand their business to Toledo, Ohio. So Julie packed up her bags and moved to Toledo to run the new store, while her father ran the Ann Arbor store. But the area and the people were unfamiliar to Julie, the economy was in a recession, and business wasn't as good as expected. In the summer of 1985, Julie closed the store and came back home to Ann Arbor to continue working with her father until 2006, when she opened a store of her own. Top