Dallas: Norah Jones at Booker T. Washington High School

Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts sits in the Dallas Arts District, one of the most concentrated arts corridors in the country. It opened as a magnet school in 1976 with a singular mission: train gifted young artists who have both the talent and the ambition for professional careers. Norah Jones walked through those doors as a teenager from Grapevine, and left with a voice and a vision.

At Booker T., she shifted her focus from saxophone to jazz piano. She sang in the choir, studied harmony and theory, and began to understand what serious musical training could do for a natural talent. The school’s competitive environment pushed her. She entered the Down Beat Student Music Awards and won. Then she won again — back-to-back honors for Best Jazz Vocalist, plus a third award for Best Original Composition.

The School That Heard Her First

Booker T. Washington has produced a remarkable roster of alumni across music, dance, and visual arts. For Norah Jones, it was the place where ability became craft. She learned to trust the piano, to let her voice find its register, and to write songs that meant something to her. Those disciplines would travel with her to the University of North Texas and then to New York.

Her first solo public performance came on her sixteenth birthday — piano and voice at an open-mic coffeehouse, singing “I’ll Be Seeing You.” She had been trained to perform by then. The nerves were still there, but the foundation was solid. Booker T. Washington had built it.

Five Grammys on debut. Twenty-seven million albums sold. It started in a Dallas arts magnet school where a girl from Grapevine learned that her voice was worth listening to.