Editor's note: Former WUFT reporter Katie Hyson produced this story in partnership with Report for America as a follow-up to her award-winning 2022 history of Eastside High School's band. Hyson now reports for KBPS in San Diego.
At the Ram Band’s half-time show Friday night, Eastside High School students will dance a half-century of history back onto the field.
The new band director, Chip Powell, is bringing back a marching style common to historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). That style was the pride of Gainesville’s east side since the days of the all-Black Lincoln High School, which was shut down after the 1970 federal enforcement of desegregation.
Richard Parker, Lincoln High’s band director, brought the style with him to the newly integrated Eastside High. The band united Black and white students during the racially tumultuous 1970s. They earned a “second-to-none” reputation and straight superior ratings at band competitions.
It was the east side’s signature swag. Unlike the military corps style of the region’s other marching bands, their horns swung with every step, knees high stepping to right angles. The crowd stayed seated for half-time, skipping bathroom and popcorn breaks, waiting for the breakdown when students would set their instruments in the grass and dance to popular music.
Alumni and longtime neighbors call it “the spice,” “the cherry on the cake,” and “the funk.” Other schools might have had better football teams or fancier cars in the parking lot, but halftime belonged to the east side.
That style was nearly lost to history. By the early 1980s, white families had increasingly moved farther west. The school was in danger of no longer meeting the federal mandate to desegregate. They created an International Baccalaureate (IB) program in hopes of enticing non-Black students from the west side of town. As soon as Parker retired in 1990, they hired a new band director who taught strictly corps style.
Eastside’s “spice” vanished. Especially for Black neighbors who had already lost their high school to integration, it felt like a devastating blow. They no longer saw joy as they expressed it on the field.
Over the years, the band — which once reflected the Black neighborhoods that surround the school — became majority non-Black IB students.
Almost a decade ago, alumni of Parker’s band began to try to change that. What started as a reunion to preserve Parker’s legacy became a lengthy effort to bring the traditional style back to Eastside.
They said the movement was bigger than the music. They wanted to engage Black students in band again, raise test scores and lessen discipline referrals. They wanted to show Black students their culture was valued.
‘The Chip has fallen’
They asked the school to re-incorporate some elements of the traditional style.
“Give us that jazz. Give us that soul. Give us that beat,” said Alonzo Young, alumnus of Eastside’s very first marching band class. “Give us the dance, you know, that’s all we were asking for.”
School administration declined their request, and they protested at a 2022 school board meeting.
The alumni band then decrescendoed. Their efforts became quieter. They waited to see what happened next.
Last summer, Eastside’s band director, Joseph Hughes, left the school. Interim directors carried the band through this past school year. And then alumni got the call. The school had hired Powell, an alumnus of Parker’s time leading the band.
“The ‘Chip’ has fallen,” Young said with a grin. “All that fighting and all that protesting – it worked.”
For the alumni band, it’s an answer to years of prayers.
Rodney Samuel, of the class of 1981, got a text from another alumnus: “You may want to be sitting down for this.”
When he heard Powell was returning to direct the band, he couldn’t believe it.
“I thought he was playing a dirty trick on me,” Samuel said.
Samuel remembered Powell as “a triple special,” “Eminem” and “the real Slim Shady.”
“Just cool,” he added.
Not Black and white
Samuel said people wrongly see this as a Black versus white issue. In reality, Black and white students participated in Parker’s band in equal numbers. The pride they took in their performances united them through integration and helped the new school succeed.
To him, Powell is emblematic of this unity.
Powell was bussed to Eastside High, but said it was his goal anyway. He watched his sister in Eastside’s band, and was determined to join too. He wanted the crowd’s enthusiasm and the intense work it took to get it.
“These are just high school students, right? But they were so focused on what they were doing,” Powell said.
Powell has been a percussionist since the day his mother gave him a toy drum – a metal tin frame with paper on either side.
“I used to beat that thing endlessly to the point where she hid it from me,” he said.
He joined Eastside’s band in 1983.
“Everyone proudly wore the orange and green,” he said. “We kind of performed with a chip on our shoulder – no pun intended – because we knew that there were entities that were wanting us to not succeed, and so we wanted to prove them wrong.”
Powell went on to join the famous marching band at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, an HBCU.
“To my knowledge, myself and my freshman brother . . . we were the first two Caucasian percussionists in the Marching 100,” he said.
Powell graduated with a music education degree and taught band at a dozen schools since, both corps style and the HBCU style. Like Parker, he wants students to be equally comfortable in both, prepared for any school after they graduate.
He said this wasn’t always received well by parents.
“Early on, it was met with some, I'll say, even animosity. Because a number of the schools that I've taught had a mixture of diverse ethnicities, and so a number of the parents would frown upon the contemporary music and the contemporary dance moves,” he said.
A homecoming and a strategy
He’s considered returning to Eastside before, he said, but now is the right time – especially with Leroy Williams serving as principal.
“I don't say this often, I really believe in what he is doing for the whole school. And he is 100% on board with making sure that our band is a center point, not only within the community but within the city and the region, state and beyond,” Powell said.
Powell said he’s not trying to undo corps style but add the traditional style back to it.
“I want to do the special thing. And we're not going to be beholden to any one style. This is the direction we're going into: We're going to do whatever it takes to put on the show,” he said.
In July, the alumni band hosted a welcome home dinner for Powell. They said it was like a family reunion: a lot of laughter, tears, hugging and offers to help.
To reach the students from the surrounding neighborhoods again, he might need all the help he can get.
“I understand that there's been great progress made and the Eastside band has been awarded great ratings over the last couple of years, and we want to continue that and take it further. But we need to include our community. And I think that's definitely Mission One is to get our immediate community back involved,” he said.
He has experience growing bands. He said he once built a high school band in Michigan from 15 students to 140.
He plans to reach out to the immediate feeder programs, Lincoln and Howard Bishop Middle Schools, find a way to bring back activity buses, maybe even open the school on Saturdays. He doesn’t want band fees, equipment or uniforms to be barriers either.
“Whether it’s through fundraising, community donations, whatever it might be, we’ve got to make this accessible,” he said.
He wants to involve the students in choosing the music, drill formations and dance routines.
“When you own it, then you want to be proud. You want to put your best foot forward,” he said.
Like Parker, he plans to open up their repertoire to contemporary songs.
“Those will speak to those younger kids because they'll say, ‘Hey, I recognize that song. If I get to play that song, I want to go there to that school,’” he said.
More important than any of these strategies, he said, are relationships.
“The way to get those younger kids into the band and to follow what you do is not just rehearsing them. Do you sit down at lunch and eat with them? Do you sit down and play games with them? Do you chat about their everyday lives, their boyfriends, girlfriends, what's happening at home?” he said.
His end-of-the-year surveys yield a consistent answer for the number one reason students join and stay in band: It’s a family.
“And that is the crux of every program I have built,” he said.” Make it a family.”
Nearly 100 students are now rehearsing with Powell for their first half-time show of the season on Friday.
Powell is focusing on making sure they can play their staple repertoire at a high level. But he says the crowd at that first show will also get a nostalgic throwback to the band’s older days – ”Rags to Rufus” by Rufus and Chaka Khan.
He’s also bringing out a special surprise – “Ram Jam Two.”
The original “Ram Jam,” penned by Richard Parker himself, is written in a B-flat bluesy swing style. “Ram Jam Two,” a yet-to-be-heard follow-up by Parker, is a little funkier, in a 12-bar blues style with extra horn riffs and runs.
Perhaps most anticipated – the students will dance again.
“It's just such an important staple in the community. It's a manner of expression, a manner of identity that has been missing. When this time came around, it was imperative for me to put my foot forward and come back home,” he said. “Show the world that that community is second to none.”
It’s an enormous task to prepare 100 high school students for their first marching band performance, especially in a style they’re not used to. Powell says it’s not so much a weight to him as it is a calling.
“I got my training in the 40 years in the desert, so to speak. And here I am and ready to go,” he said.
‘Our promised land’
In many ways, the alumni feel like they’re coming out of the desert, too.
“At some point, to be honest with you, it was exhausting,” said alumni band organizer Cathy Norman. “I was tired of fighting it. Not that I wanted to give up. I just felt something within my spirit, within my soul that this is gonna work out eventually. But at some point, I was like, ‘I’ve done all I can do.’”
And then she got the call Powell was coming back.
“I thought about everything that I had gone through fighting for this history. I sat back and said, ‘Wow. This is really happening now.’ And so this tear just trickled down my face, my cheek. These kids are about to witness or feel for themselves what we did. And that was always the goal – to sit back and watch them do it on the field,” she said.
“To be able to see the lost history now being formed by this new generation of Rams – it’s priceless,” she said.
After the decades of loss and heartbreak and struggle that followed integration, it’s emotional for Alonzo Young as well.
“I have tears of joy,” he said.
How high schoolers move on a football field at half-time may seem small. But to Young, the significance is Biblical.
“Just as the children of Israel, Chip (is) going to break us and lead us to our Promised Land, what we always wanted – freedom. Freedom to go back to our roots, go back to our tradition, go back to our culture,” he said.
More than 55 years since Alonzo lost his beloved Lincoln High, he said he finally feels peace.
“My grandchildren — when they see me with the alumni band, they say ‘Grandaddy, one day I’mma do that, too,’” he said.
Now, they can.
“Maybe I won’t have to march alone,” Young said.