Retired Richmond music teacher Joan A. Richardson dies

Picture a petite round-faced woman swathed in a colorful Yoruban costume.

She sings in a Chaka Khan-style voice as she leads kente-clad children swaying and stomping with abandon as other children pound African rhythms on the conga drums.

That's how Joan Andrews Richardson taught music, dance, heritage and self-worth in the Richmond school system for 33 years, before dying of cancer June 25 in a Richmond hospital.

"I really do saturate my children with African information," she said in a 1992 Richmond Times-Dispatch interview. "It teaches them to be proud of who they are and where they came from."

Her daughter and only immediate survivor, Narquinta Richardson of Minneapolis, recalled, "She would mainly focus on boys that would give trouble [in school]. She would make [such a child] a drummer to help him have some pride in himself."

Joan Richardson, who claimed slave as well as Afro-Cuban ancestry, was 10 years old when she heard a Nigerian master drummer in her native Tallahassee, Fla.

She later learned to play conga and djembe drums, avidly read about African cultures, learned dances at workshops and listened to African and world music.

She drew on that foundation to found the World Ensemble, a dance group of more than 60 children at G.H. Reid Elementary School, where she was a music teacher from 1989 until she retired in 2007.

Her award-winning secondthrough fifth-grade artists brought audiences of many venues to their feet to honor complex percussion, dance and vocals from world cultures sung in native languages -- performed with the characteristic perfection that she expected of them.

Although she emphasized Africa because most of her students were of African descent, "she wanted you to understand every culture," her daughter said, and incorporated elements in her teaching from wherever students' ancestors called home.

Part of an accomplished family, she was taking piano lessons at 3 years old and eventually decided to become a choral director.

As she acquired a classical music education at Fisk University and at Florida Agriculture and Mechanical University, where she earned a music education degree in 1971, Ms. Richardson researched African culture.

"She would meet African people and had gotten so good that when she met someone, she could tell you what tribe they were from," her daughter said.

She came to the Richmond schools in 1974 as a permanent substitute music teacher at Mosby Middle School and later taught on a team that circulated among elementary schools in the Elementary Program of Arts and Humanities.

When Richmond phased out EPAH in 1989, she began teaching one day a week at Elkhardt Elementary School and full time at Reid, where she was named Teacher of the Year in 1990.

The 60-year-old Midlothian resident, who, her daughter said, was "a very spiritual woman who made sure you knew what her thoughts were about God," will be honored at a service Monday at 11 a.m. at Bethel A.M.E. Church in Tallahassee, Fla.