Black Music Teachers In The Era Of Segregation

[ghost of miles]

Ethan Iverson writes at length about a topic definitely in need of more scholarly attention. (Much appreciation to Mark Stryker for his Facebook link, which is how I became aware of the article.)

Black Music Teachers In The Era Of Segregation

 

[Joe]

Thanks for linking to this.

Add to this list G.A. Baxter of I. M. Terrell High School in Fort Worth.

[JSngry]

John Hardee was at Skyline. First non-school band I was in had several of his former pupils. When his Savoy sides got a reissue in the 70s, they were kind of surprised, that wow, this guy really was who he told them about once being.

In my hometown of Gladewater, Tx. The black school (yes, singular) had a white band director, but he was a working musician who had moved here from L.A. in the mid 1950s. In LA, he was a gigging jazz/cocktail/anything pianist, and when he got the Weldon gig, he appreciated the culture. So after a while, integration came, and this guy ends up beginners band, and soon enough, high school band. Lots of his Weldon students were in high school when I was, the same age or a little older, and this guy did everything he could to bring that tradition into the now "mainstream". In marching band, he truned the drummers over to his prize studnts from Weldon, and we soon had parade cadences like NO other. In stage/jazz band, same thing. Concert band, not so much, but solo/ensemble, we ahd a saxophone quartet with a 1st altoist who wasn't hearing any Marcel Mule, if you know what I mean. It raised eyebrows at the UIL contests, but we loved it.

You can't overstate the importance of the African-American music educator in the days of segregation, and you also can't underestimate the impact that the music that was propagated in that environment had on those to whom it got exposed in the first waves of integration. I'm a living witness to that fact. I know for a fact that not all schools allowed the influence to flow as freely as it did in ours, but there. it flowed in abundance, so thank you Buzz Mezzner for doing the right thing for all of your students.

Also, to this day, I'll advocate that the u-n/under-sung feeder of all the 70s funky horn bands was the HCBU marching band tradition.

[Joe]

1 hour ago, JSngry said:

John Hardee was at Skyline. First non-school band I was in had several of his former pupils. When his Savoy sides got a reissue in the 70s, they were kind of surprised, that wow, this guy really was who he told them about once being.

In my hometown of Gladewater, Tx. The black school (yes, singular) had a white band director, but he was a working musician who had moved here from L.A. in the mid 1950s. In LA, he was a gigging jazz/cocktail/anything pianist, and when he got the Weldon gig, he appreciated the culture. So after a while, integration came, and this guy ends up beginners band, and soon enough, high school band. Lots of his Weldon students were in high school when I was, the same age or a little older, and this guy did everything he could to bring that tradition into the now "mainstream". In marching band, he truned the drummers over to his prize studnts from Weldon, and we soon had parade cadences like NO other. In stage/jazz band, same thing. Concert band, not so much, but solo/ensemble, we ahd a saxophone quartet with a 1st altoist who wasn't hearing any Marcel Mule, if you know what I mean. It raised eyebrows at the UIL contests, but we loved it.

You can't overstate the importance of the African-American music educator in the days of segregation, and you also can't underestimate the impact that the music that was propagated in that environment had on those to whom it got exposed in the first waves of integration. I'm a living witness to that fact. I know for a fact that not all schools allowed the influence to flow as freely as it did in ours, but there. it flowed in abundance, so thank you Buzz Mezzner for doing the right thing for all of your students.

Also, to this day, I'll advocate that the u-n/under-sung feeder of all the 70s funky horn bands was the HCBU marching band tradition.

Yes!

And leave us not forget the Kashmere Stage Band... https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5599377