Have you been to a county fair recently? This is the season. They survive in many communities in the United States today, some having run continuously for more than a hundred years. It’s a place to get a look at your community and beyond, the actual people and their families. It’s a great place to see and be seen, and get a sense of the culture beyond your immediate social circle.
It’s also a place to listen. At the one I attended, before actually seeing the many thousands of people, I heard the sounds of a band. It was captivating. As I got closer, I could see all its members under a portico playing away, a wind band with clarinets, trumpets, tubas, drums, flutes, everything.
The music was American patriotic songs, old-time favorites, Sousa marches, songs from famous musicals, and so on. You would recognize every song.
They played all day. As a brass player, I know my chops now would not last 15 minutes. They were there for hours and hours nonstop. You could see they enjoyed every minute of playing. So did the people who sat on the bleachers and sang and clapped along.
You could blur your eyes and think it was 1930 or 1890. It was that traditional and completely thrilling. The band director was elderly. The sign said he founded this community band in 1969. He has been director ever since. The players are volunteers, not paid a dime. The sounds you heard were the fruit of hours and hours of practice. The entire event was made alive because of this band.
We all know these people. They played in the high school band and marched for the halftime show. They were very good at their instruments. They played in all-state band and considered it as a career. But they realized in college that it was not the path for them. They still loved doing it and kept up their skills variously through marriage and children.
The community band gives these people a chance to play and serve their community at events. They play at the mall, at the main park, at the fair. That amounts to only several times a year, but rehearsals are ongoing, and the people in the band are another social circle beyond neighborhood and church. Maybe some of them have known each other since grade school.
I know the director, too. Not personally, but as an archetype. In 1981, Dan Fogelberg came out with a touching song called “The Leader of the Band.” I remember listening on the radio and thinking it was just about dads in general. That’s because my father was a leader of a band. As with all kids, I had no clue about how strangely unique my own father was.
Indulge me please in a story. He was an outstanding trombonist, guitar player, pianist, composer, choir director, and singer, in addition to being a historian, scholar, and writer. He was extremely proficient at trombone but didn’t want to pay union dues. As a result, he could not play in paid professional gigs or play in the symphony. Instead, he directed the church choir, and he played in smaller venues such as a German band during Oktoberfest and so on.
At some point, he decided to create his own community orchestra. Next thing you know, my brother and I were in rehearsals with this group of random people who had answered his newspaper ad. We were pretty terrible at first, but we got better and better. We eventually did what this fairgrounds band did. We played at the park, at the mall, at church festivals, and at craft shows.
My father took every event extremely seriously, with set-up hours before and periodic panics about illnesses in the horn section or how the oboist was always late. It was highly stressful for him, but he loved every minute. I simply could not have known or understood at the time that he was never paid for any of this. It was instead a passion, a deep love of music, and a desire to serve the community that drove him. As I think about it, it is highly likely that my mother was driven batty by his obsessions.
As he got older and life took him in a different and more pressing professional direction, he had to give up his band. But he never gave up his love of music. Months before he died, he came with me to a house party in the town I was living in, found a guitar in the house, and started playing and singing for everyone. The people at the party cheered and cheered, and he kept going. I sat there beaming.
In the car on the way home, he apologized to me because he assumed I would have been embarrassed by his singing. I assured him that it was the opposite and I was amazed that he could have thought such a thing. I’ve always wondered why. It might be because performing music is always a matter of baring one’s soul and maybe that always feels a bit strange. He was in my town with my friends and just figured that I would not appreciate that.
That, and that next day in which I tried to get him to go on a walk with me but he declined, is my last memory of him. He died in his hometown; his heart just stopped beating, much to my and everyone’s amazement. But his music? It lived on.
Years later, I was touring Texas and went into a Baptist church. My father’s own hymn was taped to the inside of the hymnal, beautifully typeset. Then I recalled that he had briefly founded a music publishing company, too, because he could not get big publishers to print his compositions. He decided to do it himself, in the same way he started a community band and orchestra.
Now you see why the words of Fogelberg’s song have always struck me: “I thank you for the music and your stories of the road/ I thank you for the freedom when it came my time to go/ I thank you for the kindness and the times when you got tough/ And, papa, I don’t think I said I love you near enough.”
Yes, those words make me cry. As do these: “The leader of the band is tired and his eyes are growing old/ But his blood runs through my instrument and his song is in my soul/ My life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man/ I’m just a living legacy to the leader of the band.”
When I was young, I had no idea just how unusual this man truly was. Now that I look back, I see it. And when I was at the county fair and watching that old man wave his arms around and direct the music, I saw him again, and all these memories came rushing back.
That’s what traditions do. They make us recall. They give us meaning and place. They knit together the generations. They shape communities and make them coherent. They make life more lovely. Without them, we are at sea without sails or a compass.
Maybe it seems implausible, but you too might experience some of this at the county fair. It’s right around the corner. Have a look. It could bring back a sense of community that we all so desperately need today.
