50 years of music: Homewood Patriot Band celebrates 50th anniversary

They called it the “death march.”

Years ago, before the Homewood Patriot Band switched its focus to Friday nights and parades, the legendary band took part in regional and state competitions. It usually ended with the band lifting the first-place trophy.

Cindy Wade, the founder and longtime leader of the Star-Spangled Girls, an auxiliary group to the band, said the band would march into competitions single-file, very “austere.”

“Every other band got quiet,” Wade said.

The message to the judges was, “We’re here to play,” Wade said.

And for 50 years, the band has played: in Homewood, in competitions, in Dublin, in multiple Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parades, multiple Tournament of Roses Parades — wherever there has been a need for an elite high school band, the Patriot Band has probably been there.

“The band has been such a unique animal for the city of Homewood,” Wade said.

:The band may have been all over the world, but at the end of the day, former band director Ron Pence, who still helps out on a part-time basis, said they don’t forget where they come from. There’s still a great deal of emphasis on the three parades in the city: Christmas, Homecoming and We Love Homewood Day, he said.

“We’re still Homewood’s band,” Pence said.

Building the legacy

The band began in 1972, the first year Homewood High School students had their own building.

The school’s first principal, Michael Gross, hired Wade to start and oversee the Star-Spangled Girls and hired Freddie Pollard to lead the Patriot Band.

A few years later, after Pollard left to go into the ministry, Pat Morrow came in. He stayed from 1976 to 1995 and became the first high school band director from Alabama to take a band to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City and the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena.

He also took the Homewood band to perform in the New Year’s Day Parade in London and two St. Patrick’s Day parades in Ireland. They won both the Dublin and Limerick, Ireland, competition parades, and the trophies still sit in the Homewood band room.

But when Morrow first took over, there were only 35 students in the band at his first rehearsal. Coming from a school in Gadsden that boasted a 150-student band, Morrow was “a little bit shocked.” But by the time football season rolled around, the band had grown to 75 students. By the time he left in 1995, the band had 150 students, and it has since grown to roughly 400 students.

“We recruited a lot,” Morrow said. “We put a pretty good group on the field.”

Transportation expenses were “steep,” Morrow said, as the school had to charter buses to away games, parades and competitions.

Being in the parades was a “lot of fun,” Morrow said. He recalled his color guard leader broke a bone in his foot at the beginning of the band’s first Tournament of Roses parade but still walked the seven-mile route.

Despite his colleague’s broken bone, Morrow said it was nice to see the way people lined up to watch a parade, something he and his students had not seen before.

The band’s first year in New York, Morrow recalled telling his students to follow him wherever he went. When they went to Radio City Music Hall to see a performance, Morrow got up to get some concessions. When he turned around, he found the entire band behind him, having thought he was leaving. After a good laugh, they sat back down.

Pence followed Morrow and stayed until his retirement in 2020. While bands have changed over the years, it’s never been in the plans for Homewood, he said.

“We don’t run from tradition,” Pence is known for saying. “We are tradition.”

Pence said he taught many wonderful students. The best part about his job is interacting with the community, which does a great job supporting the band, he said.

“The community’s support and belief in what we’re doing is second to none,” Pence said.

Pence recalled his first Friday night performance. He said the kids kept telling him they would “turn it on” for Friday night, and they turned into a “different group of people” when it was showtime, he said.

That was evident weeks later when the band traveled to the Hoover Met to play Hoover High School, Pence said. The crowd saw a patriotic show and the shooting off of more than 200 fireworks, he said.

When the band got back to the school, a group of students drove up to Pence, jumped out of the car, and without saying a word, gave him a hug, jumped back in the car and drove away.

During Pence’s time, the band grew by the hundreds. He said it has been “fantastic” to watch the band grow.

“I always say: In Homewood, if you can dream it, you can do it,” Pence said.

Friday nights in Alabama

Friday night football in Alabama is special, Pence said, and it is a community event.

Moving the Homewood Patriot Band is also somewhat of a community event, as it takes eight charter buses and two equipment trucks, Pence said. It includes gathering thousands of drinks, food for 450 to 460 people and of course, hours and hours of rehearsal time.

“It’s so special,” Pence said. “It’s all about the band, the cheerleaders, the football team and the fans.”

There are so many things that go into the halftime performance, he said. As someone who now helps current band director Chris Cooper part time, Pence said he gets to be a grandfather — getting the fun of interacting with kids while Cooper takes care of all of the planning and execution of the show.

Cooper started in 1999 and worked with Pence before taking over as director upon Pence’s retirement. He credits much of the growth he’s seen to the band’s philosophy, which allows band members to compete in athletics and be a part of other activities. There’s also the tradition of performing in parades and the almost assured trips out of state, if not out of country.

For whatever reason, the band’s numbers also grew when they stopped competing, Cooper said.

“It’s just become the thing to do in Homewood,” Cooper said.

While he’s in his 30th year, Cooper isn’t looking to retire anytime soon.

“I have no desire, whatsoever, to stop what I’m doing,” Cooper said. “I wake up every morning and I can’t wait to get to school.”

This year’s show, a tribute to the 50th anniversary of the band, was a “tearjerker” during the Battle of Lakeshore, a game against John Carroll Catholic High School at Samford University on Aug. 19, Cooper said.

“We wanted to make it a tribute to Homewood,” he said.

In your blood

In addition to the instrumentalists and drumline, there are the Star-Spangled Girls, now led by Wade’s former pupil, Jennifer Ayers, and the color guard, led by Terrance Cobb, who also serves as the band’s assistant director.

Cobb said the color guard is an “integral” part of the band. For the past 16 years, he’s seen it evolve away from the military-style precision of the past to a more dancing, expressive form of color guard.

“It’s awesome to see the pieces of the puzzle come together,” Cobb said.

The auxiliary adds the “icing on the cake” during the show, Cobb said.

“You hope the crowd appreciates it as much as you do,” Cobb said. “It gives you a visual element you don’t always get when you think about band.”

This year’s show includes a flag for each of the 50 years of the band, adding a personal element for band alumni, Cobb said.

For the drumline, drums light up red and blue as the drummers thrill the home crowd, which is as glued to the band as they are to the Patriot football team.

For the Star-Spangled Girls, Wade called her first couple of years “like inventing the wheel.”

She brought in the dance team from neighboring Shades Valley High School to help the 22 inaugural members learn how to be on a dance line. The girls chose the name Star-Spangled Girls in their first year, she said.

For 26 years, Wade led the girls not only to become expert dancers, but to be “ready for society and for a job.” Coming from a Catholic-Italian background, Wade admits she was “very strict.” The girls were expected to be on time, keep their uniforms in order and to march as well as they danced. Wade graded their performances.

But Wade also learned with them, she said.

“I couldn’t ask them to do something I didn’t know how to do,” Wade said. The girls would practice at times three hours in the morning and three hours at night for a couple of weeks, and that doesn’t include the time they spent at band camp.

Years later, Wade still spends time with former dancers.

“It’s so neat to be Attila the Hun and now become their social friend,” Wade said.

And while the girls are older now, they still call her “Ms. Wade.”

“It’s a nice sign of respect,” she said.

Wade accompanied many of the trips to parades, as well as special occasions like former President George H.W. Bush’s inaugural parade.

Wade said the community has always supported the band, taking part in fundraisers so parents didn’t have to worry about footing the bill for everything.

Ayers succeeded her mentor when Wade retired. Wade didn’t want someone from outside the system taking over, Ayers said.

“I always wanted to be a Star-Spangled Girl,” Ayers said. “At that point Homewood [was] … one of the first public school systems to have a dance program. It was very unprecedented.”

The girls are “one of the hardest-working” groups in the school, Ayers said.

“Cindy really instilled in us a desire to be our very best,” she said. “We never settled for mediocre.”

Ayers said she tries to keep the tradition of teaching and enabling the young women in the group to be proud of themselves.

The girls shed a lot of “blood, sweat and tears,” she said, but it’s worth it on Friday night.

“I always get butterflies when a great show is on the field. It’s what I live for.”

In the last 50 years, hundreds and hundreds of students have come through the Homewood Patriot Band. But while they’ve left the band, it’s never left them, Wade said.

“Once you are a Homewood High School band member of any sort, … it’s never out of your blood,” Wade said.