Music education can give kids valuable life experience

Junior year, I was done. Three sweltering July band camps behind me, I didn’t want to spend my last summer in Mississippi stuck on a practice field, legs itching from grass clippings and bug bites, quick-stepping to the megaphone orders of Dr. David “one more time” Daigneault.

So I quit.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved marching band. We performed in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City the same year as 9/11.

We rocked a Scorpions-themed halftime show, and I played the “Rock You Like A Hurricane” guitar solo thanks to a band director with an open mind and a John-deere-powered orchestra pit.

So why on earth would I quit?

From marching band to Music City

Well, I had started another band of my own. A fourpiece cover band called The Players. We were a — how shall I put it — bar band.

Most weekends, I used my brand new driver’s license to meet my grown-up bandmates in the gravel lot of some regional watering hole. We had our own PA and custom-logo T-shirts for sale. We had become so popular that we booked as many weddings as we did bar gigs. Plus, the pay was crazy good for high school money. I’m talking hundreds of dollars.

All those Friday night halftime shows were starting to cramp my Players tour schedule, and what teenager wouldn’t trade a sweaty uniform for a Fender Stratocaster?

I was on my way to a bigger, broader world. A long journey that would land me in Nashville, Tennessee, where today I enjoy success as a respected recording artist, in-demand session musician, and songwriter. I’m living the dream.

What music education teaches kids

Back in 2003, I wasn’t a particularly popular kid. Nor was I anywhere close to making the football, baseball, track, golf, or tennis teams.

But in that faded blue band hall, I found a place where I could belong. A place where folks were excited to see me walk through the door each day. A place where I mattered.

High school marching band taught me to show up on time. It taught me patience, discipline, and teamwork. How it feels to win. How it feels to lose. How to do both with grace. Call me crazy, but I don’t believe that the music part of music education is the most valuable thing I picked up in marching band.

My life experience is proof that music education is imperative because of its singular ability to give children a chance to develop social and emotional learning, self-awareness, and self-management skills. Music education teaches children how to master the art of responsible decision making.

Children need music more than ever

Which brings me back to why I quit marching band. I quit marching band because it had led me to the next right thing.

Today we live in a world limping back from a very traumatic two years. Ours is a collective trauma. Our children feel it too. Which is why, more than ever before, our children need a place that feels like that faded blue band hall did to me.

That place might be an after-school program in a church basement. It might be the lady-down-thestreet’s front parlor piano bench. It might be a bar gig. It’s all music education.

We live in troubling times, y’all. Take it from a marching band dropout: Our children need what music education has to offer. It can lead them to the next right thing.

Charlie Worsham is a Nashville-based recording artist, session musician and songwriter. He has served as an Artist Ambassador for the CMA Foundation, which during week of May 2 announced its 2022 Music Teachers of Excellence recipients in celebration of Teacher Appreciation Week.