the story behind the book

You could say that I wrote a book about marching bands because I was in one.

More than thirty years ago, I marched in a high school band called the Richmond Red Devils. Some two hundred of us spent half our summers learning and rehearsing three-minute shows for the Indiana State Fair Band Day. The summer before my senior year, we won that contest, which made us state champions. A few months later, we marched in the Rose Bowl Parade and at Disneyland. I’d always been a good student, but I’d never been a state champion anything. I wrote my application essay for Radcliffe College about how being in marching band had given me, a bookish girl new to town, a chance to reinvent myself and a place to belong. It wasn’t until I arrived in Cambridge that I learned how anachronistic marching band seemed to people outside the Midwest.

For the next quarter-century, I didn’t think much about marching bands. I moved to big cities on the coasts, where my experience in marching band became another artifact of my Midwestern upbringing that I trotted out to amuse friends, along with a taste for mini-marshmallows and grated carrots in jello.

A twenty-fifth high school reunion, that cliché of middle age, lit the fuse for the book. Chased to a table in a far corner by a too-loud DJ, a group of us started sharing the back stories to our high school years, stories no one could have pulled out of us as teenagers: fears of not fitting in, anxieties about our class or race, an abusive stepmother, parents hobbled by alcoholism or mental illness, families coming apart. Those of us who had been in band, we discovered, had found a surrogate family there. Beyond the refuge and comfort, we also believed that we were more effective and harder workers, more comfortable with risks and as leaders, because we had been in high school marching band.

After the reunion, I wondered if marching band was still transforming lives. The country had changed dramatically since the mid-70s. Teenagers seemed more sophisticated. They juggled more choices. I didn’t see how marching band fit into a faster-paced, more technologically focused culture. I called my former band director, John Parshall. He told me, “You won’t believe how much bigger band is now.”

I spent much of the next eight years confirming the truth of what he said.

Tom Dirks, former director at two-time national champion Center Grove, gave me my first foray into the new world by agreeing to be the subject of an article that appeared in Indianapolis Monthly magazine. During the research on that article, I realized that high school marching bands created a surprisingly rich stage for playing out teenage hopes and dreams and identities, along with the strong emotions that arise from aspiration and risk and the tension between the individual and the group.

I was surprised to find no serious book-length exploration of this specific—and specifically American—subculture. Center Grove director Dirks later organized a meeting of more than a dozen of Indiana’s most experienced band directors for a half-day discussion with me about the history, trends, and future of marching bands in the state—a forum that was a reporter’s dream, and which led me to Max Jones and Concord. At Concord, an evolving brand of evangelical  Christianity added an unexpected layer to the subculture, and the moving personal stories of the teenagers I met there gave the narrative a power that was far greater than I could have imagined at the beginning of the process. At some point in the research I realized I was witnessing not just a story of a marching band but a story of America.