Welcome back. Glad you're here.

I went looking for the moment the Dobyns-Bennett band became the Dobyns-Bennett band, expecting to land on some director in the eighties with a big idea. Found 1926 instead, and a group of downtown merchants who had worked something out about this town before most of the town had. Also on the docket: a weekend worth leaving the house for, one thing at the end of the month that deserves your attention, and a House Hunch out past the end of a driveway.

In today's post:

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If you grew up here you have heard that band. Standing in the bleachers on a Friday in September. On Broad Street behind a fire truck. On a television in your grandmother's living room on Thanksgiving morning while somebody yells for everybody to come look, that's us, that's DB.

Everybody in Kingsport knows the band is good.

What almost nobody knows is that being good was the assignment from the start, and that the merchants downtown were the ones who wrote it.

Start with 1926. That August the Kingsport Times ran a notice inviting high school boys and girls interested in a band to come to a meeting. The man behind the notice was S.T. Witt, called Fess, who had come over from Norton, Virginia to build one out of nothing. Forty-five kids showed up and stayed. Ten cornets. Twelve clarinets. Five trombones, six saxophones, three basses, two alto horns, two baritones, two drums, two fifes, and one piccolo.

The timing was not an accident. That same year the high school moved into a new building on Wateree Street and took the name Dobyns-Bennett. The city was nine years into being an incorporated place and was still deciding what kind of place it intended to be. It got a new school and a band in the same breath.

By the late thirties the band was parading down Broad Street before football games, walking the actual street to pull people out of the actual stores. During the war they played servicemen out of town. That was the job. Show up where the town is and make the town feel like a town.

Then April 1940.

The band loaded up and drove to Gate City to play a benefit concert for the Shoemaker High School band. The proceeds went to the other school. Witt described the trip as a goodwill tour. The travel expenses were covered by the Kingsport Merchants Association, which would later become the Chamber of Commerce.

Read that again. A merchants group paid to send a high school band across the state line so it could raise money for somebody else's high school band.

A city that had existed for twenty-three years had already worked out that the most portable thing it owned was sixty teenagers and a bus.

There is a lesson sitting in that ledger entry and it is not a sentimental one. A school system with no travel budget and a merchants group with no band each held half of something. Neither one builds a hundred-year reputation alone. Kingsport has run that same play over and over since, Eastman with the schools, the city with Fun Fest, and the pattern holds every time. What gets built here gets built by two parties who need each other. The things that got attempted by one party working alone are mostly things you have never heard of.

By the end of that year the Kingsport Times was reporting the band had gone ten appearances against the best in East Tennessee without being outclassed, and calling it the top marching outfit in the area. The reputation was built inside fifteen years and it has never come apart since.

Everything after is compounding. The Rose Parade. A presidential inaugural. Five trips to the Bands of America Grand National finals. Macy's in 1984, 1988, 1993, 2004, and 2011. A winter guard that took a WGI world championship in its class in 2023.

Which brings us to November. Macy's picked ten bands out of more than a hundred applicants for the 100th Thanksgiving Day Parade, and DB is one of them. Sixth trip up there. The band turns 100 the same year the parade does, a piece of symmetry director Lafe Cook has pointed at more than once, and Macy's sent along a $10,000 grant toward the fundraising, which against the cost of moving a band that size to New York City is a start and not much more.

So a hundred years on, the arrangement holds. The town pays to send the band out. The band goes and represents the town. Somebody in this city stands in a kitchen in November and points at a screen.

Fess Witt put a notice in the paper and forty-five kids answered it. Turns out that was the whole plan.

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Three things worth knowing this week:

Downtown Kingsport Whiskey and Wine Social | Friday, August 14, 6:00 to 9:00 PM | 240 E Main Street The Downtown Kingsport Association's fundraiser, presented by B&B Package Store. The money goes back into downtown, which is the rare case where the fundraiser and the thing being funded are the same block. Details

Cars and Coffee | Saturday, August 15, 8:00 AM | 321 W Market Street Fifth one of the season. Get there early, walk the rows, drink the coffee, be home by ten with the whole day still in front of you. Details

Kingsport's Summer Send Off | Saturday, August 15, 3:00 PM | Kingsport Farmers Market, 308 Clinchfield Street Last call on summer at the Market before the school calendar eats everybody's Saturdays. Details

Relay For Life of Tri-Cities TN takes over the Kingsport Farmers Market and Carousel at 308 Clinchfield Street on Saturday, August 29, from 5:30 to 8:30 PM. Same block you were standing on two weeks earlier for the Summer Send Off, doing something considerably heavier.

Relay is the American Cancer Society's flagship fundraiser, and this one covers the entire Tri-Cities. The money raised at a market pavilion in downtown Kingsport goes to research, to rides to and from treatment, to the round-the-clock helpline, to free lodging for people who have to leave home to get care. Survivors and caregivers are the center of the evening and always have been. That is the design of the whole thing, not a nice touch bolted onto a walk.

As of this week the event has brought in $16,254.67 against a $20,000 goal, with sixteen days to go. Hope Shines is leading the teams at $9,429, which tells you there is room for a second team to make that interesting.

You can join a team or start one, buy a luminaria in somebody's name, or just put money in. Jessica Poff is the staff partner on this one at 423.534.1616 if you want to talk to a person instead of a form. Give

258 Alice Private Drive. Kingsport, TN | 3 bed, 2.5 bath

No marching band is getting up this driveway.

The house sits at the end of a long gravel drive on a little over five acres in Colonial Heights. Three bedrooms, all of them upstairs, with two full baths up there alongside them. Downstairs is the half bath, newly updated, and the laundry room, also updated, which puts the two rooms you actually deal with every day on the floor you actually live on.

Outside is where it makes its argument. A wraparound porch. A screened back porch for the stretch of the summer when the bugs are winning. A small above ground pool. Five acres wrapped around all of it, at the end of a private drive, and still inside a few minutes of Kingsport and I-81. The distance is a decision here rather than a commute.

The sellers are offering a home warranty. They will also tell you flat out that the driveway is rough at the moment from the recent rains, which is a thing sellers almost never put in writing. Take it for what it is. They know, and they are not pretending otherwise.

Full listing at sellstateline.com.

Information deemed reliable but not guaranteed. Buyer to verify all details through independent due diligence.

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Talk soon,

Ryan