Music Lessons as Life Lessons in New Orleans Marching Bands

Abstract

In New Orleans, musicians in school marching bands are more popular than athletes, and spectators marvel at the choreography and musicianship on display in Mardi Gras parades and sporting events. Lessons imparted in the bandroom not only prepare a select few with the tools to pursue a career in music, they offer all students “culturally sustaining pedagogies” unavailable in core curriculum classes. But in prioritizing high-stakes testing, racialized “career readiness” schools have relegated arts education further to the periphery, denying young people an opportunity to socialize themselves as black subjects in ways that they find meaningful and valuable.

Keywords::

• blackness
• charter schools
• culturally sustaining pedagogies
• marching band
• music
• New Orleans

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Derrick Tabb and Nakita Shavers for their collaboration and friendship, and to all the educators and students who helped me understand the significance of marching band. I also want to thank Rachel Breunlin and Sue Mobley for their helpful comments on this article, and Sonya Robinson for sharing her insights into arts education. Research on human subjects during 2006–2007 was approved by Columbia University's Institutional Review Board (IRB).

Interviews

11/07/06 Bennie Pete interview at American Routes studios

12/15/06 Lumar LeBlanc interview at American Routes studios

01/03/07 Interviews with Principal Kevin George and students L.C. Bacchus, Desmond Bell, Quincy “Q” Bridges, and Christopher “Skully” Lee at Rabouin High School.

01/03/07 Bennie Pete and Melvin Tate interview at American Routes studios

4/12/07 Keith Frazier interview at American Routes studios

8/1/07 Nakita Shavers interview at Sound Café

Various discussions with Derrick Tabb and Darryl Person.

About the Author

Matt Sakakeeny is an ethnomusicologist, journalist, and musician in New Orleans, where he has lived since 1997. He is an Associate Professor at Tulane University Department of Music. His book, Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans, is a firsthand account of the precarious lives of brass band musicians in New Orleans. Keywords in Sound, co-edited with David Novak, is a critical reference work for the field of sound studies. He serves on the Board of Directors of Roots of Music and the Dinerral Shavers Educational Fund.

Notes

The Whole Gritty City (New York: Band Room Productions, 2014), http://thewholegrittycity.com/ and educator’s website https://www.academicvideostore.com/video/the-whole-gritty-city (accessed August 17, 2015).

Alice Fothergill and Lori Peek, Children of Katrina (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015).

Katy Reckdahl, “Feeling His Spirit,” New Orleans Times-Picayune (accessed January 10, 2007), 1.

At least since Melville Herskovits’ The Myth of the Negro Past (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941), scholars have argued that characteristics associated with black music are not biologically intrinsic but socially learned. Kyra Gaunt writes, “Black musical style and behavior are learned through oral-kinetic practices that … teach an embodied discourse of black musical expression” (The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop [New York: New York University Press, 2006], 2, emphasis in original). Characteristics such as participatory performance, inseparability of music and the body, oral and corporeal communication, call and response phrasing, rhythmic syncopation, and repetition—what Amiri Baraka called the “changing same” of black music—are acquired through social interaction, cultural immersion, and encounters with sound recordings and media representations (“The Changing Same [R&B and New Black Music],” in Black Music [New York, W. Morrow, 1967], 180–211). I would argue that any account of socialization into black music performance should also be attentive to the ways that formal music education is interwoven into the sociocultural fabric of young peoples’ lives. In New Orleans, all of the musical characteristics enumerated above are integral to marching band.

Samuel Floyd, “Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry,” Black Music Research Journal 11, no. 2 (1991): 265–87. Christopher Wilkinson, “The Influence of West African Pedagogy upon the Education of New Orleans Jazz Musicians,” Black Music Research Journal 14, no. 1 (1994): 25–42. Thomas David Brothers, Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).

David Chevan, “Musical Literacy and Jazz Musicians in the 1910s and 1920s,” Current Musicology 71–73 (2001/2002): 200–31. Al Kennedy, Chord Changes on the Chalkboard: How Public School Teachers Shaped Jazz and the Music of New Orleans (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005). William D. Buckingham, “Louis Armstrong and the Waif’s Home,” Jazz Archivist 24 (2011): 2–15.

Quoted in Lawrence Bergreen, Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), 33.

Louis Armstrong, Swing that Music (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1936), 17.

The precise order of marching band formation varies according to the preferences of the band director and the make-up of the auxiliary team. For example, not all schools have a cheerleading, dance, and flag team, and all-boys schools such as St. Augustine have none.

J. Mark Souther, “Making the ‘Birthplace of Jazz’: Tourism and Music Heritage Marketing in New Orleans,” Louisiana History 44, no. 1 (2003): 39–73; Matt Sakakeeny, “Playing for Work: Music as a Form of Labor in New Orleans,” Oxford Handbooks Online, http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935321.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935321-e-23 (accessed March 2, 2016).

On unemployment, see City of New Orleans, “Mayor Landrieu Announces Economic Opportunity Strategy for Disadvantaged Job Seekers and Businesses,” http://www.nola.gov/mayor/press-releases/2014/20140909-economic-strategy (accessed August 18, 2015).

Judith Becker, “Is Western Art Music Superior?” The Musical Quarterly 72, no. 3 (1986): 341–59.

Susan Young, “Towards Constructions of Musical Childhoods: Diversity and Digital Technologies,” Early Child Development and Care 179, no. 6 (2009): 695–705.

Band arrangements of “radio tunes” extend a dialogue with popular culture, such as the representation of the Morris Brown College band featured in the 2002 movie Drumline and sampled in the 2006 song “Morris Brown” by the hip-hop group Outkast.

Django Paris, “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Change in Stance, Terminology, and Practice,” Educational Researcher 41, no. 3 (2012): 95.

Luis C. Moll and Norma González, “Lessons from Research with Language Minority Children,” Journal of Reading Behavior 26, no. 4 (1994): 23–41.

H. Samy Alim, “‘The Whig Party Don’t Exist in My Hood’: Knowledge, Reality, and Education in the Hip Hop Nation,” in Talkin Black Talk: Language, Education, and Social Change, ed. H. Samy Alim and Jon Baugh, vol. 17 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2007), 28.

Paris, “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy,” 93.

On “Apartheid Schools,” see Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005), 19.

There is also the phenomenon of “bandheads”: adults who graduated long ago but continue to follow the activities of bands and band directors at football games and through the internet, on the Times-Picayune “High School Bands” forum (www.nola.com/forums/hsbands) or the “Bandhead Social Network” website (http://www.bandhead.org) (accessed June 3, 2015).

Jacqui Malone, “The FAMU Marching 100,” The Black Perspective in Music 18, 1–2 (1990): 61.

Richard L. Walker, Jr., “The Life and Leadership of William P. Foster: The Maestro and the Legend” (PhD Dissertation, Indiana State University, 2014), 143.

Matt Sakakeeny, Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

There are several Catholic schools in New Orleans that have renowned bands, including the all-black, all-male St. Augustine High School, the all-black all-female St. Mary’s Prep, and the nearly all-white all-male Brother Martin.

Kathryn A. McDermott and Kysa Nygreen, “Educational New Paternalism: Human Capital, Cultural Capital, and the Politics of Equal Opportunity,” Peabody Journal of Education 88 (2013): 84–97.

Johanna Wald and Daniel Losen, “Defining and Redirecting a School-to-Prison Pipeline,” New Directions for Youth Development 99 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 9–15.

Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 10.

Micah Gilmer, “‘You Got to Have a Heart of Stone to Work Here’: Coaching, Teaching, and ‘Building Men’ at Eastside High” (Doctoral dissertation, Duke University, 2009).

Kristen L. Buras, Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance (New York: Routledge, 2015), 125–59.

Kathryn Marsh, The Musical Playground: Global Tradition and Change in Children’s Songs and Games (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 7.

On “scaffolding,” see Amanda Minks, Voices of Play: Miskitu Children’s Speech and Song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 90.

Mary Bucholtz, “Youth and Cultural Practice,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 529.

Kyra Danielle Gaunt, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 2.

Dan Baum, “To Be Continued,” Oxford American 71 (February 2011): 158–65.

James Gill, Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1997).

Stuart Hall, “What is This ‘Black’/In Black Popular Culture?,” in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 27.

The most renowned bands, such as St. Augustine and Landry-Walker, are able to negotiate higher fees with Mardi Gras Krewes. Most bands earn additional funds by performing for conventions, Mardi Gras balls, and other private events booked by tourist destination management companies and contractors such as Blaine Kern’s Mardi Gras World.

Quoted in Brothers, Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans, 108.

Armstrong, Swing That Music, 1.

Michael Patrick Welch, “School Music Programs, Marching Bands, Staging Post-Katrina Comeback,” The Lens, http://thelensnola.org/2012/10/24/school-music-back-in-new-orleans (accessed June 3, 2015).

Ibid.

Not all of the socialization practices in the band room have positive effects on young people; for example, band has historically been a space where imbalanced gender norms are reproduced. FAMU and many other HBCU bands were initially strictly the province of men, and though many are now ostensibly open to female participation, men continue to far outnumber women, especially in the brass and percussion sections. As a whole, the auxiliary team is perceived as a female domain and is subordinate to the male-dominated band (though the drum majors straddle and have authority over both sections). There is a complex relationship with black musicality, which among New Orleans instrumentalists is perceived as a male-dominated space. This is reproduced in the exclusive representation of male professionals in my research, and in this article I was not able to suitable address the auxiliary team or female musicians. While socialization of gender norms may not be a positive component of the band experience, students are obliged to confront established gender roles that they are likely to encounter in settings outside of school, and consider how to situate themselves within and without them.

In 2007, the Louisiana legislature passed Senate Bill #299, Act 175, which requires “full implementation of the visual arts curriculum and the performing arts curriculum for all public school students in kindergarten through grade eight, including … 60 minutes of instruction in the performing arts … each school week,” but the state did not allocate a budget to implement or enforce this mandate. Instead, the Louisiana Department of Education eliminated the position of Fine Arts Program Coordinator in 2012, terminating an employee who had rigorously advocated for the arts. See Richard Allen Baker Jr., “The Relationship between Music and Visual Arts Formal Study and Academic Achievement on the Eighth-Grade Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) Test” (PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, 2011).

See Adrienne Dixson, “Whose Choice? A Critical Race Perspective on Charter Schools,” in Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans, ed. Cedric Johnson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 130–51; Sarah Carr, Hope against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle Educate America’s Children (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); Buras, Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space.

James S. Catterall with Susan A. Dumais and Gillian Hampden-Thompson, The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth: Findings from Four Longitudinal Studies (Washington DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2012), http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/Arts-At-Risk-Youth.pdf (accessed June 3, 2015), 24.

Ibid., 18–21.

Nick Rabkin and E. C. Hedberg, Arts Education in America: What the Declines Mean for Arts Participation (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2011), http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/2008-SPPA-ArtsLearning.pdf (accessed June 3, 2015).

Susan Weinstein, “A Unified Poet Alliance: The Personal and Social Outcomes of Youth Spoken Word Poetry Programming,” International Journal of Education & the Arts 11, no. 2, http://www.ijea.org/v11n2/ (accessed June 3, 2015): 5.

Pia Moriarty, Immigrant Participatory Arts: An Insight into Community-building in Silicon Valley (San Jose, CA: Cultural Initiatives in Silicon Valley, 2004), 13.

For a thorough discussion of musical socialization in New Orleans pertaining to the “Music For All Ages” program, see Rachel Breunlin and Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes, Talk That Music Talk: Passing on Brass Band Music in New Orleans the Traditional Way (New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press, 2014).

A similar criticism could be made of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, “Turnaround: Arts,” http://turnaroundarts.pcah.gov (accessed August 18, 2015). On the increasing reliance of the state on philanthropic organizations, see Vincanne Adams, Markets of Sorrow, Labors of Faith: New Orleans in the Wake of Katrina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).