Debbie Kee: Teaching generations of music lovers

Debbie Kee has just as much energy as her little, wriggling music students.

She bounces and giggles right beside them, never missing a beat.

Surprisingly, the 64-year-old Lincoln resident has never had a cup of coffee in her life. Not one drop.

“Seriously,” she said. "Seriously!"

Kee – known as Miss Debbie by most – runs Keenote Music Studio, working out of her custom studio on a 34-acre farm in Lincoln. She also teaches classes in a small room at The Feed Company on Route 16 in Milton and at Browseabout Books in Rehoboth Beach.

Sitting on the floor in her Milton studio, legs crossed and music playing in the background, Miss Debbie smiles from ear to ear, encouraging a class of toddlers to use their voices. She waves her hands and claps, encouraging the children to let go and sing loud and proud.

So that's exactly what they do.

“You know what's neat about singing?” she asked. “Singing is from your toes to your head, and it involves everything. Everybody's voice is so special to them. It's like your name. That's why I know all of these kids' names – because that's part of them. So music is also that. It comes from within. It comes from the heart. It comes from the soul. It's just wonderful.”

Before she was known as Miss Debbie, she was a girl who always loved music. Starting in middle school, she played the clarinet and later started a folk club with some high school friends. Her mother, Betty DeBoer, played guitar with a friend – they were known as Betty and Barb – and would tour nursing homes, with a younger Miss Debbie in tow to sing along.

As a child, she moved quite a bit with her family. Beginning in 1956, she spent her summers in what was once the only red beach house in Lewes. Her parents, both University of Delaware graduates, eventually moved back to the First State when Miss Debbie enrolled at her parents' alma mater.

“They still have the Lewes house, which we still use,” she said. “It's about the 15th house down from the public beach, and still has the original old, knotty pine.”

After graduating with honors and a double degree in elementary and special education, Miss Debbie got a job teaching locally, as a special education teacher at Carrie Downie Elementary School in New Castle, where her mother also worked as a guidance counselor.

“I went to school there, my husband went to school there, and my mom even taught kindergarten there,” she said. “So we had such a connection.”

After a year of teaching, Miss Debbie became pregnant with her first of two daughters and her husband started a new job. They moved to Milford and while there, she enrolled in an aerobics class at a local dance studio.

Music and the arts have always been close to Miss Debbie's heart, but it wasn't until she was asked to help out as an instructor at the Milford studio that she realized she could teach children literally anything.

“That got me into teaching 14 years of dance,” she said. “And I wasn't even trained in it! But I can teach kids anything.”

A few years later, she began teaching Kindermusik classes at the Music School of Delaware, but it didn't take long for her to realize she wanted to have her own studio. In 1999, Miss Debbie had a studio built while farming the land she shared with her husband, Ed Kee, who is now the secretary of the Delaware Department of Agriculture. To her students, she said with a giggle, he's known as Mr. Debbie.

“We did 2,500 cantaloupe plants and 5,000 tomato plants and peppers and everything you can think of,” she said. “It was a lot of work. Meantime, I'm teaching, and in the summer for 13 years, I also coached Shawnee Country Club's swim team.”

The grandmother of five admits she doesn't know how to do anything but go, go, go.

Miss Debbie takes her cues from Kindermusik and Musikgarten, musical teaching theories that began in Germany. Adding her own spin, her classes – for newborns to teens – focus on music and movement to help develop early learning skills that go far beyond knowing the lyrics of a song. At Keenote Studio, Miss Debbie nurtures her students and their parents, and provides a comfortable setting for bonds, and the children themselves, to grow through music and movement.

She also uses her curriculum to keep oral history alive, teaching her young students classic nursery rhymes, tongue-twisters and nostalgic pieces that might otherwise be lost.

“Let me call you sweetheart, I'm in love with you,” she sings as an example, with a sweet tone and perfect pitch. “Those old ones, we're losing them if we don't keep doing them.”

After more than two decades of helping area children find their voices, Miss Debbie is finding that her former students are now parents, and they're now bringing their children back to the studio.

“That's been a joy for me – it's that second, third generation now,” she said. “I took pictures of all my classes, so once in a while I bring in pictures and say, 'This is your mom when she took tap classes with me!'”

No matter how many years go by, if you give her a hint, Miss Debbie will remember now-grown students by name, whether they cross paths in a local grocery store or when they enroll their newborn babies in her energetic Baby Beat class.

“That's what I'm about – every one of these kids is my family,” she said. “Once they're in, they are the Keenote family. It's a neat thing, and I don't plan on stopping.”