Tori Amos taught herself to play piano at the age of 2, and started composing at the age of 3. She was admitted into the Peabody Conservatory at the age of 5, but lost the scholarship six years later, reportedly due to her dislike for using sheet music and interest in rock and pop music.

Tori Amos

Amos is the third child of Mary Ellen (Copeland) and Edison McKinley Amos. She was born at the Old Catawba Hospital in Newton, North Carolina during a trip from their Georgetown home in Washington, D.C. Amos has said that her maternal grandparents each had an Eastern Cherokee grandparent of their own. Of particular importance to her as a child was her maternal grandfather, Calvin Clinton Copeland, who was a great source of inspiration and guidance, offering a more pantheistic spiritual alternative to her father and paternal grandmother’s traditional Christianity.

When she was two years old, her family moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where her father had transplanted his Methodist ministry from its original base in Washington, D.C. He… Continue Reading

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tori_Amos#Early_life_and_education