Our first high school band director was an idiot. Later, I got to know him a little as an adult and it turns out that he's a great guy. But exclusively as a band director, he was an idiot. All he knew about discipline was yelling or yelling louder. As a teacher he was a really good clarinet player. But I only just realized what an idiot he was.
My freshman year, we played three songs in our halftime show. I don't remember one, unless it was Virgen de la Macarena, which we DID like. But two I definitely remember. One was Without A Song and the other was Tara's Theme. I didn't know anything about Without A Song at the time, and we played it so poorly that nobody learned much about it from us. In my old-time radio listening, I finally heard it properly, which is to say Porgy and Bess style. That was maybe OK in 1943; in 1977 in an integrated school, and coupled with Tara's Theme from Gone With The Wind-- well, color me retroactively mortified.
Perhaps the thinking was that hey, it's 1977, it's the New South, we're so advanced that we can just forget all that slavery stuff. Did I mention that he was from California?
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