The Sweetest Sound I Ever Heard

The Sweetest Sound I Ever Heard

I can’t recall exactly when I fell in love; it seemed meant to be from the start.

After years of not really fitting in anywhere, band, and later choir, gave me a home.

By the second semester of my last year in junior high school, I was so band-obsessed, so overboard in my devotion to band, that my parents actually moved to a different neighborhood so that I could attend a high school that I felt was my destiny: Robert E. Lee High School.

Our band director was Dennis Johnson. Mr. Johnson was only about 25 or 26 years old when he was my teacher.

Mr. Johnson was tough as nails. He had come out of the Auburn band and was a part of the Spirit of Atlanta drum and bugle corps. He was a percussion instructor with Southwind, the drum and bugle corps based in Montgomery. It’s hard to imagine now, but in the 1980s, the DCI activity was more than a movement; it was a way of life for many young musicians.

What was interesting to me was that Mr. Johnson was also a Lee graduate. Lee High School (now Percy Julian High School) did a really good job of maintaining its traditions and history, mainly by moving up longtime employees into administrative positions and hiring from within. Lee High also loved to hire its own graduates once they finished college. So, for many years, even decades, Lee High School was insulated in a protective bubble on Ann Street in Montgomery.

The Lee Band tradition was so important to Mr. Johnson, and to all of us, that we started band camp the week after graduation. I still have the paperwork from my rookie year: drums came back June 5-9. Then, beginning June 13, we had Tuesday and Thursday night rehearsals from 4:00-8:00 p.m. In July, we went Monday through Thursday, from 4-8 p.m., four nights a week! By August, we were ready for full-blown band camp. Two weeks of 8:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night, Monday through Friday. By the time school began, we were more than ready.

But as enjoyable as marching band was, what I really loved was concert band. We had a magnificent set up at Lee. The top 40 players were in the Symphonic Band, which played the most difficult of the classic band literature. The other 90-100 players were in the Concert Band. We also had a Jazz Band that was by director’s invitation only.

I made the Symphonic Band on trombone my first year. And I still remember the hours and hours of rehearsal on those pieces: “Procession of Nobles” by Rimsky-Korsakov and “Variations on a Korean Folk Song” by John Barnes Chance were the hardest pieces of band literature I’d ever played. I can remember looking out the transom windows at the overcast February sky, with Lee High School almost seeming like one of those black-and-white pictures in my parents’ yearbooks. 

Flash forward about 25 years, and Mr. Johnson showed up to test fifth graders for the sixth grade band at Tallassee, where I was working. When he was at my band room, even after all the times back in the day that he’d made fun of my geeked-out band recording habits, he had a request. He asked if I had any recordings of us. I walked into the storage closet and produced a box of tapes. 

I put the cassette of our 1990 State Contest performance on the sound system in the band room. For a moment, we were transported back 30-plus years. To me, it sounded like those old recordings of the 1950s-era Lee Band, back when Johnny Long was putting the school on the map, and the fidelity of the recordings was not so great. 

Now, removed from the era in which these recordings were made, they are older than the original Lee Band recordings were when I first heard them in the 1980s.

But what fascinated me was not the recording of those great musical works, amazing as it was that we played such difficult music so well; it was what I saw in my mind as the musical notes drifted by. I saw Ann Street in black and white looking out of the transom windows in the Lee band room, and a young Mr. Johnson drilling us on some of the hardest music I’d ever played. 

How could my teenage self have known that I would still get that thrill, just listening to the sweetest sounds I’ve ever heard.

Michael Bird is assistant professor of music at Faulkner University.