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East Idaho Wonder Women: Valerie Doggett's gift for music led her teacher to give up on her

60 views · Published 7 May 2018 · 3:21 · Indexed 23 September 2026

Channel: East Idaho News · 2018 · News & Politics

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REXBURG—

STAND UP – I’m Natalia Hepworth and this week we’ll be introducing you to Wonder Women living and working here in east Idaho…. Today meet Valerie Doggett…

NAT SOUND

SOT:  “I see it as just black dots. I don’t know how to count,” Pianist Valerie Doggett says. 

NAT SOUND

SOT: “Once I hear it I can do it. It’s the hearing,” Doggett says. “If I have a hymn book or any music in front of me I can see the dots, and I just know where they go on the piano.”

VO: Valerie Doggett has been playing the piano for over 50 years, but she only took lessons for two. 

SOT: I” took piano lessons in first and second grade and I had a great piano teacher,” Doggett says.

VO: She remembers riding her bike down Utah country lanes to her piano teachers home.

SOT: “One day when I was waiting to play the piano because there was another student there, an older girl, she was playing this most beautiful, beautiful song I’d ever heard,” Doggett says. “I remember thinking I want to play that song, and I at that time thought, everybody hears what I hear.”

VO: And that’s exactly what she did. When it was her turn to play Doggett began playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, just like the student before, and her teacher was not impressed. 

SOT: “She says ‘What are you doing?’ and I said, ‘I’m playing a song,’ and she goes, ‘Where’s the music?’ and I said ‘Well, uh there isn’t any music. I’m just playing it because it’s so pretty,’” Doggett says. “She went and called my mom and said that she would not be able to teach me piano lessons anymore.”

NAT SOUND

VO: But she didn’t let the discouragement of her teacher hold her back. 

SOT: “How can you help a child whose sitting there playing Moonlight Sonata in first grade,” Dogget says. “I played by ear and she knew that, but she just wasn’t trained on how to help me.” 

VO: Doggett says she’ll often her sounds of orchestras and various songs in the middle of the night. 

SOT: I’ll just get up and go and play it on my synthesizer an have it recorded, because the next morning when I wake up it’s gone,” Doggett says. 

VO: Doggett says she’s learned not everyone can play by ear like she can. 

SOT: “When I hear a song being played on the radio or any place it’s like I am just moved by it, and it brings tears to my eyes, and I just want to go and play it,” Doggett says.
 
SOT: “It actually became a game for us as kids because we’d always find a song on the radio, or hear some new music, and so we’d always try to see if we could outsmart mom and get a song that she couldn’t play, but she’d always proved us wrong, and was able to play it,” her son Matthew Doggett says. 

VO: As Matthew Doggett and other siblings have grownup they’ve been surrounded by their mother’s natural ability for music. 

SOT: “It’s just really relaxing to come in here on Sunday mornings, with the whole family and just listen to mom play, and that’s how it’s always been waking up to mom playing the piano, it’s been great,” Doggett says. 

VO: With help Doggett has written musical pieces for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Now she is serving as a Stake Music chairman at a Brigham Young University Idaho student stake. She continues to look forward to opportunities her gift will bring. 

SOT: “Some of us have many and some of us have a few, but I just feel like if we really try and strive really,really hard to find those gifts I think our lives will be so full of joy,” Doggett says. 


STAND UP: Stay with us all week as we introduce Wonder Woman…I’m Natalia Hepworth, EastIdahoNews.com

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