MALDEN — A Poplar Bluff High School graduate and her students make sonic waves at the Malden R-1 School District.
Shelby Hammond, 23, of Poplar Bluff took over as director of bands at Malden this past school year, and is the third music educator in as many years to assume the reins.
“This is my dream job,” Hammond says. “I hope to change lives someday.”
The global Covid pandemic sidelined classes in spring 2020, and effectively stranded many music programs nationwide. Malden was no different.
Hammond, fresh from studies at Three Rivers College, where she earned an Associate’s Degree in Music Performance, and from Southeast Missouri State University, where she was in 2022 awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Music Education with an emphasis in Instrumental Music, knew she had plenty of work ahead.
The freshman educator set out rehearsing the Malden High School Green Wave Marching Band during sweltering August heat in preparation for fall football games, concerts and parades.
“This year is the first time in three years we’ve participated in competitions,” Hammond says. “The first time for us to work up football half-time shows and the first time we marched together as a unit.”
Although football season has culminated, autumn weather is in full swing. It’s a crispy, sunny afternoon in late October at the Bootheel. It finds Hammond instructing her players in last-minute moves for its performance in today’s annual Halloween parade.
The Malden High School rehearsal room is a cacophony of swirling colors and endless noises. Hammond’s band of approximately 30 students and a number of color guard members in masquerade roam in clusters around its tiled floors. It’s a dervish of a laughably loud monster that creates random, wicked sounds, and sometimes haphazard but somehow fluid motions.
Hammond steps up on her riser and with steely expressions surveys the class. She’s all business now, and her band knows it.
Most of its members, anyway.
“One, two, ready, GO,” Hammond orders.
Her arms have left her sides and she conducts the group with formidable, rhythmic gestures.
“Hey, if you’re hanging out in the back I need you to be quiet!” she announces. Students take notice and participate.
The band warms up playing scales in rounds, the B-flat version of stretching prior to a demanding relay race.
“We’re going to run down everything we’re going to be doing for the parade,” she informs the group. “Start with the fight song.”
Hammond is in charge.
“Everybody stand up please,” she insists. “Our main goal for this parade, everything we play must be in tempo!
“Don’t worry so much about marching,” she continues. “Here’s your tempo!”
She claps her hands together to instill a kinetic quality to this rehearsal and the students respond. They’re attentive and concentrate on the up-tempo beat. Hammond counts the introduction to the Malden High School fight song.
Loudly.
“One, two, ready, GO!” she says.
The band answers in kind and blasts its way through the tune. The fight song completed, the group winds through its version of a popular number, “Feel It Still,” and begins the third tune of this practice session, “The Hey Song.”
Sudden cries from a percussion section member.
“I broke my head!” she announces.
“Oh J.J.,” Hammond whispers, laughing, as she evacuates her conductor’s riser and approaches the drum line. “Now is not the time.”
It’s T-minus 40 minutes to lift off.
Hammond assesses the situation and indeed finds a broken drum head. It’s perforated with no hope for survival, and just minutes before the group’s bus loads for the trip from the school to the parade route.
An emergency percussion safari is at hand.
Hammond paces the floor like coaches on sidelines. She enlists aid from a couple of students to search the roomful of continuous disturbance and together they locate a temporarily retired drum. It’s cannibalized nonchalantly for its striking surface and the director settles on the floor to effect repairs.
“We really need more instruments,” Hammond says. “Much of the stuff we do have is just broken.
“Our inventory is pretty shallow,” she laments. “We make do as best we can with what we have.”
She spends about 15 minutes swapping out the drum head, much like changing a car tire. Out with the old sliced head and on with the not-so-new, but usable, item.
The room becomes louder and more alive without Hammond at the wheel. She scans her band stoically and returns instructing on the fly.
“From letter B,” she commands, this time playing a trumpet. She’s at the helm. Again, Hammond is all business.
“Drumline!” she reprimands. “Everybody stand up!
“Okay!” she says emphatically. “Run it again!”
It’s 4:48 p.m. and in a few minutes the entire city will hear from the ensemble as it makes its way along the crowded parade route.
“I have an idea,” Hammond declares. “Drumline, play one of your cadences.”
Now she has a silver flute and she’s using it as a conductor’s baton. She waves it in time like a drill instructor demonstrating for his troops.
The performers mimic her motions. They’ll use instruments as batons during drum cadences today.
A clarinet falls apart and half of it crashes to the floor.
Hammond is busy fixing lyres and distributing glow-sticks.
“Once you have a glow-stick go outside and load up the bus,” she says.
This is a dream job?
“It’s hard work,” Hammond explains. “But it’s worth it.
“We get to make differences in people’s lives,” she continues. “Not a lot of jobs out there offer that. We get to teach more than music. We teach accountability and socialization. Yes. It’s my dream job.”
Marching band is not Hammond’s sole concern. She teaches 32 sixth-graders, absolute beginners “who never even held an instrument, much less played one,” 17 seventh graders and five eighth graders the nuances associated with music.
“There are a lot of reasons why I do this,” Hammond says. “When I was a kid I had a lot of struggles at home.
“Band was the only thing I could rely on,” she adds. “Music was an escape for me. A healthy escape.”
It’s an environment she feels good about creating at Malden.
“I want band class to be a safe place for kids to enjoy,” Hammond says. “Music should be a fun way to express yourself when words can’t.
“These kids have met my expectations,” she emphasizes. “Are we perfect? No. It’s not an easy thing to do. They spent tons of hours on it. They showed up. They stood up, went out there and did their absolute best. That’s all I could ask for.”