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In a recent article by Jeff Griffith for Drum Corps International (DCI.org) he reports that 2021 Ill Teacher of the year Justin Johnson will be delivering DCI’s annual meeting keynote.
He is an excerpt of that article below:
Justin Johnson grew up in a town with a population of about 7,000.
Local schools and music programs weren’t booming with resources, but Johnson, now a high school educator, shares nothing but love for his small hometown of Ripley, Tennessee.
“My high school that I teach at right now is almost half the size of my hometown,” Johnson said in an address to the drum corps community as part of the DCI annual winter business meetings held virtually January 5-9. “My hometown didn’t have a McDonald’s until my senior year of high school.”
It was at his hometown high school, though, that Johnson was introduced to marching music and specifically drum corps. During a casual midday hangout in the band room, Johnson’s director opened a window into the activity, by way of Star of Indiana’s silver-medalist 1993 production.
“I remember my band director going, ‘Hey, you want to see something?’” Johnson said. “He showed me a DVD — not a DVD at that point, good God, it was a VHS tape — of ‘93 Star of Indiana. And that was the first time I saw any drum corps.”
Johnson was hooked.
“‘I want to do that,’” he remembers saying to his band director.
His band director was honest with him in response, setting expectations out of the gate.
“He said, ‘Well you play saxophone,’” Johnson said. “‘So you’d have to learn to play something else.’”
So, Johnson did. He spent the following summer working tirelessly to learn mellophone. Ultimately, all of that practice led him to an open audition opportunity held by the Bluecoats.
Johnson, a young Black man — at the time still in high school, speaking with Bluecoats’ then-staff member Charles Stewart, now a Bluecoats Hall-of-Famer — was clear about what provided the convincing factor in joining Bluecoats.
“(Stewart) looked like me,” Johnson said. “I remember the comfort that I felt, talking to Charles Stewart in this dark parking lot in Sevierville, Tennessee, because he looked like me.”
Johnson’s mother, understandably, had similar initial thoughts about her son’s prospects of joining the Canton, Ohio corps.
“I also remember the first words out of my mother’s mouth when I called and told her that I was going to get on a bus with the Bluecoats,” he said. “‘Are there any people that look like you?’”
Ultimately, Johnson’s decision to join the Bluecoats as a performer and later instructional career with the corps.
Johnson’s story, which spans far beyond the drum corps activity is just one example of a critical truth; representation in all walks of life is paramount, and the arts are no exception. It’s because of the comfort he found in feeling represented within his corps’ staff that, in part, sparked his journey to becoming a prominent music educator and an instructor in the drum corps activity.
And its that same representation that he’s now able to help display to countless educators and aspiring educators, having recently been honored as Illinois State Teacher of the Year for 2021.
Follow this link to read the full article: HERE
