The most famous Philly musician (for toddlers) is building an empire

One summer night in 2015, Olivia Phan and her husband, Ian Hayden, were at dinner at Bridget Foy’s on South Street when they met a particularly charming waiter.

“He was very talkative, and gregarious, a really nice guy,” Hayden recalls. “Then he proceeded to get all of our orders wrong.

“ ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m obviously not a waiter. What I’m trying to do is start doing music classes for kids. Would you like to come to one?’ ”

The server was John Francisco, a Georgia-born musician, actor, and educator who had recently moved to Philadelphia from Chicago. He had just started Mister John’s Music, a school that’s fostered a community of music-loving families and turned Francisco into a South Philly celebrity.

He now heads a growing children’s music empire with a new headquarters in a converted South Philly town house, plus satellite sites around the Philadelphia area and South Jersey, and start-up schools in Atlanta and Brooklyn.

Phan and Hayden brought their oldest daughter, Levity, to a rented dance studio near South Street when she was 1. That first early childhood music lesson was built around the music of Beyoncé.

“There was one other couple with their toddler,” Phan says. “From the very first minute, we were like ‘Wow!’ It really put to shame every other experience we had for parents and babies here in Philadelphia.”

The rest of the South Philly couple’s story is typical among Francisco’s fans. Levity, now 10, and the couple’s other daughters, Serena, 8, and Treble, 6, play multiple instruments and have attended Mister John’s classes and open mic performances since they were infants. Hayden has taken adult guitar classes and is considering ukulele lessons.

“What John does brilliantly is say, the kids are going to have fun, there’s music, there’s shakers, they’re going to learn about important things,” he says. “But instead of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle,’ you get somebody who is incredibly accomplished musically singing songs you would hear on the radio. It’s not a chore anymore.”

On a recent Thursday in the spacious Eighth Street studio Mister John’s moved into in October, it was Gwen Stefani week.

The class would make themselves heard on “Don’t Speak” and other No Doubt favorites. But Francisco kicked off the class for a dozen or so dancing, delighted 1- to 4-year-old music lovers — and their parents, grandparents, and caregivers — with “Love,” from the 1973 Disney movie Robin Hood on the guitar. He then switched to piano for a jaunty take on Amy Winehouse’s “Valerie.”

Julie Wilen, whose twins Sloan and Jesse, 5, are Mister John’s veterans, was in the class with her 2 1/2-year-old daughter Ellie. She compared Francisco to “a way more fun Mister Rogers. The lessons are about accepting others. He really makes you feel like you’re part of a community.”

Wilen’s twins attended classes pre-pandemic but really became hooked during lockdown, watching weekly episodes featuring Francisco and his fellow teachers mixing in classic children’s songs with artists like Sia or Rihanna.

“We watched those videos every single day,” Wilen says. “They would remember what shirt he wore in each and say ‘I want to watch rainbow Mister John’ or ‘I want to watch yellow Mister John.’ ”

Francisco’s own musical education began growing up outside Macon, Ga. His parents are lawyers, but his mother went to Juilliard. When he goes home, political arguments are often avoided by making music together. “I make them do a lot of Brandi Carlile, and my sister loves to sing the Avett Brothers.”

“I played everything as a kid,” says Francisco, 43. That included piano, trumpet, trombone, tuba, bassoon, and banjo. “I didn’t really find an instrument that felt correct until I started playing guitar,” at 28.

After college at the University of Georgia, he moved briefly to New York City, where he was working at a Broadway theater when the planes struck on Sept. 11, 2001.

He moved to Chicago and stayed for 13 years, acting in productions put on by the LGBTQ theater company About Face. His first taste of teaching came from a friend who taught kids at the Old Town School of Folk Music.

“I realized I wanted to do it too,” and, within a year of picking up the guitar, he was teaching music to children on the autism spectrum. “I loved it,” he said. “When you teach, it’s not about you. It’s about the people that you’re lifting up.

“I love teaching people to sing because we all have a unique voice. Nobody has your voice. It’s exciting to relay to kids that they don’t need to sound like anybody else.”

Francisco wound up moving to Philadelphia “because I was dating somebody and he got a show in New York. I asked him if he wanted me to move with him, and he said, ‘No, I want you to figure out what you want to do next.’ That was tough to hear, but also the greatest gift he could have given me.”

He had friends in Philly, and in 2015 he launched Mister John’s in the rented dance studio where Phan, Hayden, and Levity were among his first families.

Within a year, Mister John’s was open for business on Ninth Street in the Italian Market, where it has been growing steadily since. Francisco now employs 20 music teachers, and 500 kids are enrolled in early childhood classes, with 200 more older students and adults. Business is concentrated in South Philly, but there are classes in Wayne, Haddonfield, Margate, Media, Wilmington, and elsewhere around the region.

Casie Girvin leads the voice program as well as adult choir and cabaret classes. She auditioned for the job at an outdoor open mic on Ninth Street in early 2021, and sang Hoagy Carmichael’s “The Nearness of You.” Francisco hired her on the spot.

Girvin, who is also the assistant director of Arden Theatre Company’s The Lehman Trilogy, has a wide range of students. “The youngest in my kids choir is 4 and the oldest in my adult choir is in their late 70s,” she says. “In theater, sometimes we call it a ‘survival job.’ But honestly, at John’s ... it’s kind of an informal artists’ collective. He fosters a lot of creativity.”

Her 30-person adult choir will take to the main studio on Sunday afternoon for a Valentine’s Day “Love is Love is Love” event. It’s open to the public, and if the weather is good the windows will be flung open and the sound will spill onto the street. Another forthcoming event is a TransJam on March 8, an open mic designed “to provide a safe space to make music for trans persons and their allies.”

“John is ... like Willy Wonka if [Wonka] was the mayor of a music school. He’s quite a wonder of a person,” Girvin says.

Francisco has ambitions to take Mister John’s to even more cities “but this year is all about sustainability” and getting the new studio building fully up to speed. There is a garage band room still to be completed, and work being done so Francisco himself can live on the third floor of his music clubhouse.

“What I’d like to be is the musical Mr. Rogers,” he says. “He’s the standard. It’s about multigenerational belonging. When you walk through the door, you should feel like you are walking into your own home.”