The Stage: Pete Seeger, 15,000 People, and a Thumb Piano
The BoldTimers Oral History Project • The Thumb Piano That Opens Doors • Chapter 1
He drove up in a ’63 Bug with a small instrument in his hands and a slightly reckless idea in his head: “Let me on the stage.”
The producer brushed him off. So, David scanned the crowd, spotted Pete Seeger talking with friends, and walked right up as if they’d shared coffee a hundred times. He leaned in, introduced himself using the name he carried in Africa—“ Daudi Mohammed”—and played a short tune into Seeger’s ear on an African thumb piano.
Later, Seeger called him up. David remembers sitting there, smoking a whole pack, convinced he’d been forgotten—until the signal came and the crowd did what crowds do when something new hits their ears at once: it leaned forward and clapped like it meant it.
“I was so scared… I had never played in front of 15,000 people before.”
That’s the kind of story that tells you what this series is going to be about.
A small instrument. A big life. The nerve to ask. The grace to listen. And the strange way one thread—music, in David’s case—can stitch together decades that might otherwise look like separate lives lived by different people.
The “African thumb piano” David talks about is commonly known as the mbira or kalimba—a lamellophone with metal tines you pluck with your thumbs, rooted in Southern African traditions and heard across the diaspora.
Who is David Thiermann?
David is 80 years old, and in our first conversation, he moved from origin story to world story without ever losing the human scale.
He says he was conceived in New Jersey, born in Philadelphia, and raised in Santa Monica—ocean nearby, salt air baked into the memory. He left at 17 for University of California, Berkeley in 1963, transferred to University of California, Santa Barbara in 1965, then took a turn that feels almost impossible in today’s credential-obsessed culture: he went to Tanzania and worked in a leprosarium for three years.
There, he says, he was responsible for helping provide work and occupational therapy for about a thousand patients, and he did it by starting a business that made traditional African musical instruments, learning directly from the people around him, including members of the Nyakyusa tribe.
When he came back, University of California, Santa Cruz gave him retroactive academic credit for that fieldwork—an institutional nod to something older and wiser: lived experience counts when you can show the work.
He also describes studying musical instruments connected to Vodou ceremonies in Haiti, organizing a public health dispensary project there, and later organizing a TV series in Brazil for that country’s Ministry of Health in 1971.
And if you’re thinking, That sounds like three separate lifetimes, good. That’s exactly why it’s worth recording.
The series premise: the instrument is the through-line
Early in our talk, David said something that reads like a table of contents:
“I’m going to be telling you a lot of stories about serious trouble that I got into because of music and serious trouble that I got out of because of music.”
That’s the hook for this entire project: music as passport, music as risk, music as survival tool, music as joy.
David doesn’t describe himself as a traditional musician; he says he can “get noise out of anything,” and most of what he plays is improvisation, made on the spot.
He’s also been collecting instruments since childhood, and he traveled widely—he even says he visited every country in South America except Venezuela, chasing festivals, museums, and whatever sound might teach him something new.
When David landed somewhere and didn’t yet know the language, he carried instruments over his shoulder—thumb pianos, small flutes, harmonicas—because music could break the ice and build trust faster than vocabulary drills.
That detail matters for anyone 50+ standing at the edge of reinvention. We tend to treat “starting over” like a résumé problem. David treats it like a human-contact problem: How do you build trust in a new place? How do you show you’re safe to talk to?
Rio: when the story turns hard
Some lives have a single “big dramatic moment.” David’s life seems to have several, and one of the sharpest edges in our first conversation came from Rio de Janeiro.
He tells a story about opening his apartment door to a hallway of men with machine guns, being pushed to the floor, having his money and passport taken, and realizing—fast—that survival sometimes depends on how quickly you can read a room and keep your head from spiraling into panic.
Later, he learned the raid had connections to political turmoil and someone his roommate had sheltered. David was, in his words, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He thought about going home.
Then the thumb piano showed up again.
A person in Rio encouraged him to audition for a popular Brazilian TV program hosted by Flávio Cavalcanti.
David tried out, played the thumb piano, and says he won first place—becoming, overnight, recognizable as “the thumb piano guy,” and using the prize money to help complete his Ministry of Health TV work.
“It was quite a turnaround.”
That phrase—turnaround—is the heartbeat of BoldTimers. Reinvention isn’t always a clean pivot with a neat LinkedIn headline. Sometimes it’s a crooked path where one skill becomes the rope you grab in a bad moment.
Santa Cruz: joy as a practice, not a mood
If you want to know what someone values at 80, watch what they do for people who can’t offer them status.
David told me about visiting a retirement community—Dominican Oaks—to entertain residents in their 80s.
A friend played mandolin. David decided to “play the fish”—a battery-powered singing fish he’d picked up at a flea market. He turned it on, let it flop and sing, and said some of the residents laughed so hard they nearly fell out of their chairs.
And then he said it plainly:
“I love entertaining people… it gives me a lot of joy if I can bring some joy to other people.”
That’s the line I want to carry into this series. Because the real question for encore years is less about “How do I stay busy?” than it is about “What do I do that reliably makes life better for someone else?”
A life you can map by objects
This first conversation gave us a handful of “chapter objects”—the kinds of things that can anchor memory and make a life readable:
The thumb piano that helped him build trust across languages and borders.
The guitar he bought as a teenager in Paracho, a place widely known for guitar-making and lutherie.
He still plays that guitar today, improvising along with music through headphones as if he’s been invited into the band.The hand-to-hand greeting he learned with the Nyakyusa —slow, connective, physical—touching person after person until you feel stitched back into the world by the end of the day.
I keep thinking about that greeting. It’s the opposite of how most of us move through life now: fast, untouching, half-listening. David’s stories have motion, but they also have contact.
Where this series goes next
This weekly series will work like an oral history with a beat.
Each week, I’ll ask David to pick one scene (one “frame” from his life), and we’ll build around it:
The moment (what happened, where, who was there).
The meaning (what he learned, what he believes now at 80 that he didn’t know at 20).
The takeaway (a practical reflection for BoldTimers readers navigating their own “what’s next”).
Over time, the pieces will naturally organize into a book-shaped arc—childhood, leaving home, fieldwork and risk, work and identity, love and loss, humor as survival, aging and generosity. David and I aren’t shooting for a perfect legacy, rather, we are capturing a real one with the storyteller correcting us, challenge us, and laugh at our first drafts.
And if you want the honest “series thesis” in one sentence, it’s this:
A well-lived life stays playful, stays useful, and keeps one small instrument ready for the next door that might open.
About the Author
Jerry W. Washington, Ed.D., is the co-founder and Chief Community Officer at BoldTimers, where he works with purpose-driven adults 50+ to design meaningful, experience-grounded next chapters. He also publishes What Time Binds on Substack, exploring how our tools outpace our wisdom—and what it takes to rebuild shared meaning, better judgment, and long-horizon thinking in everyday life. A United States Marine Corps veteran and educator, he is also the author of Adulthood of Humanity (2026).