As a student at Concord in the 1980s, Steve Peterson had mowed director Max Jones’s lawn. He’d joined the Concord staff after four years building a music program in the Appalachian hill country of eastern Kentucky. The 2004 season marked the first time that every woodwind student in the band had learned under him..

steve peterson
assistant director
woodwinds, jazz band

“Each year, he told the beginning band a story from his time in Kentucky to introduce a piece called ‘Possum Holler.’ He told the sixth graders that he and his wife noticed a rancid smell wafting up through the floor of their trailer. To investigate, he pulled on a baseball cap, tied a perfume-soaked bandanna around his face, and wrapped trash bags over his hands. He crawled under the trailer and stuck a hand right through a dead possum. In a touch worthy of Scott Spradling, he lingered on his description of the maggots that swarmed over his arm. Needless to say, students who came up through the Concord music program remembered ‘Possum Holler.’ But otherwise, he talked very little with Grant or the other students about his life in Kentucky, or what had motivated it.”