1504 Lamy Lane, Monroe, Louisiana
Since 1946
A piano house does not get to eighty years by moving. This is the same floor, the same corner, the same door on Lamy Lane it has always been.
The story
Nearly eighty years of Monroe's pianos
Paul Hewitt Music Co. has been helping musicians in the Monroe area with their piano needs, parts and new equipment since 1946. That is not a tagline written for a website. It is the plain fact of a family business that has outlasted the instruments it started with, the ones it added along the way, and most of the other piano stores that used to compete with it in northeast Louisiana.
James Hewitt runs the business today as president, and the floor he oversees is Monroe's largest selection of new and used pianos, organs and portable keyboards. New Yamaha instruments sit within a few feet of pre-owned uprights, consoles and baby grands that came in through trade, estate sale or a family that simply outgrew a piano nobody was playing anymore. The mix changes every month. What does not change is that everything on that floor is there to be played, not looked at from behind a rope.
A store does not survive eight decades by selling one thing one way. Alongside new Yamaha pianos and Clavinova digital instruments, the floor has carried Hammond organs, Wurlitzer consoles, Young Chang grands and Everett uprights, some new, most with a previous owner and a story of their own. The business also teaches: professional vocal and instrumental lessons for a first-time player working out where middle C is, and for a serious student ready to take the next step. Call 318-372-1449 for who is teaching and when, because that is the one thing here that genuinely changes week to week.
The Hammond corner
Music's Most Glorious Voice
There is a corner of the showroom that has never really changed. The original Hammond dealer sign still hangs there, the one that reads "Music's Most Glorious Voice," and there is almost always a Hammond console standing under it, drawbars out, waiting for someone who remembers what one is supposed to sound like. Hammond organs are a genuine specialty here, not a leftover category nobody bothered to clear. Consoles and tone cabinets rotate through in cherry and walnut finishes, and the people who ask about them tend to already know exactly what they are looking for.
That specialty runs deeper than the sales floor. Keeping a sixty or seventy year old Hammond playing means keeping the parts and service side of the business running too, and that side of the shop does not show up in a showroom photo.
Hammond console, original signage
Photographed on the floor at 1504 Lamy Lane
The bench, chassis open
Wiring loom and service plate, mid-repair
The working bench
Parts and service, not just a sales floor
Behind the showroom is a bench, and on it, more often than not, is a chassis with its cover off, drawbars disconnected, a service plate exposed and a wiring loom laid out in the order it needs to go back together. An instrument built in the 1950s or 1960s was not built to be thrown away when a part failed, and this shop still treats it that way. Eighty years in the same building means eighty years of knowing how these things actually work, not just how to sell one.
Rows of uprights receding toward the back wall tell the rest of that story: this is a working showroom on top of a working shop, and both halves have been open the whole time.
When the playing life ends
A grand piano case, rebuilt as a bookshelf
Not every piano that comes through the door is worth restringing. When one reaches the end of its playing life, this shop does not send the cabinet to a landfill. The case gets rebuilt into furniture instead, the curved rim of a grand turned into a bookshelf, a Hammond tone cabinet turned into a bookcase, a console reworked into a writing desk. Nobody else in Monroe is doing this. Each one is one of a kind, they turn over like the rest of the floor, and they show up in the showroom for a while before they leave for a house that will keep them for another eighty years.
“Service here was great. We didn’t buy a piano but the salesman was very helpful and explained lots of different products to us.”Jacob C.
Come stand in the room
The best way to understand eighty years of this floor is to walk it. Come in Monday through Saturday, 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, sit down at whatever catches your eye, and ask James or Frank about the corner with the Hammond sign.