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Southern's "Human Jukebox" Adds 22 Women

By Lisa East
Black College Wire

Photo Credit: Joshua L. Halley/Southern Digest Kandace Baines, left, Joy Young and Cierra Jardouin practice selections for the Sept. 9 football game against Mississippi Valley State.

Twenty-two female musicians joined the Southern University Marching Band, affectionately known as "the Human Jukebox," this semester, the most the band has ever had.

The new members bring the number of women to 24: Eleven clarinet players, six piccolo players, three on trumpet, two on saxophone players, one tuba player and one on cymbals.

Lawrence Jackson, the band director, attributed the increase to a desire for the band to build up its woodwind section.

Jackson said women were never prohibited from joining the band. "That would have been unlawful," he said.

However, the prohibition might have been assumed since the band appeared to be exclusively male, said Jamie McMeller, a junior elementary education major from Gonzales, La., and a piccolo player.

"It was two years ago at the 2006 Parade of Champions, held downtown for both Southern and LSU," Louisiana State University, "when I saw that girls were in the band and I said 'I want to do it,' " McMeller said.

Since the early 1960s, the SU Marching Band has been almost all male. It was not until the middle 1980s that Angela Boudoin, affectionately referred to as "Rosa Parks," broke that tradition.

Boudion played clarinet and marched for four years.

She was followed by brass player Ancheryl Davis, who became the second female member of "the Jukebox" in the early '90s.

"She was better than most trumpet players at that particular time," Jackson said. "Of course, females have to be not as good as, but better than, especially in an organization oriented [to] males for a number of decades."

The band got its first female tuba player in the late '90s, when Erica Davis, who was rated in the top five among 16 other tuba players during her audition for entry into the band.

In 2005, another woman became the first to make the "Funk Fac-tory" drum section.

Her name was Dion Faire.

"It was a monumental achievement for a female," Jackson said. "Some guys stay on reserve for three years."

Jackson said other reasons for the lack of female participation include the band's marching style and the practicing regimen.

"It is all so vigorous," Jackson said, reminiscing on his days as a member of the Human Jukebox.

Tempora Fisher, a junior animal science major from Opelousas, La., and an alto saxophone player, said she first became attracted to the band during the mid-1980s, when she would come on campus with her mother.

Fisher prepared herself by participating in the high school band camp for Southern University prior to college.

"It is a band-head haven," Fisher said. "'Band-head haven' means you must live and breathe band."

Lisa East is a student at Southern University who writes for the Southern Digest.

Posted Sept. 11, 2006