Gadsden City High band to march in Philadelphia Thanksgiving Day parade

Gadsden City High School’s Titan Band will participate in the oldest Thanksgiving Day parade in the United States.

The band is set to march in the 6abc Dunkin' Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia, and will be pairing that with some sightseeing and activities in the New York area and Washington, D.C.

“This is our first big trip since I became director (in 2021),” said Chris Benedetti, Gadsden City’s band director. “We did Universal (Studios) before (in 2022), but we haven’t done anything like this.”

Gadsden City’s traveling party numbers just over 200, including a little more than half of this year’s marching band unit. “We’ve got a lot of siblings and parents going with us,” Benedetti said. “It should be a fun trip.”

They headed north on Sunday, bound for an initial stop in Washington. After a visit to Lincoln Harbor in Weehawken, New Jersey, the itinerary switches to New York for a dinner cruise, a Broadway musical and a visit to Times Square.

After the parade, the group will stop in Washington again for sightseeing on the way back to Gadsden.

The Philadelphia parade started in 1920 — four years before New York’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade — and except for the COVID-19 pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 has been held continually since then.

It was sponsored by Gimbel’s Department Store for much of its history, but now is presented by Philadelphia’s WPVI-TV and the Dunkin’ baked goods and coffee chain.

“A lot of people will say, ‘Well, it’s not Macy’s,’ but it’s the oldest Thanksgiving parade in the country,” Benedetti said. “It’s a pretty big deal. although we don’t see much of it down here. You can watch it online, but it’s televised up there.”

The preshow will start at 7:30 a.m. CDT and the three-hour parade, with the usual floats, balloons and entertainment aside from marching bands, steps off at 8 a.m. It can be streamed online at https://bit.ly/47ikwCx.

The route runs through Philadelphia’s Central City, including the famed Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and ends at the city’s Museum of Art.

Benedetti said eight marching bands are taking part this year and Gadsden City is the only entry from the South. However, multiple Alabama bands have been in the parade over the last decade, including Southside, Albertville, Guntersville, Oneonta and Arab in Northeast Alabama.

“We’re trying to get our band more nationally recognized, and this is what’s going to bring that, national performances like this,” Benedetti said. “We’ll regularly be applying for things like this. There’s an application process, you don’t just get to go, and we’re super blessed that we were selected.”

Benedetti and his wife welcomed their first child, son Lucas, on Nov. 13, and he praised his assistant, Haley Stansky, for picking up the slack in preparing the band, not just for the parade but for a playoff football game on Friday.

“We’ve been preparing for it, but she pretty much had to take over everything while I was gone,” he said. “It’s not like a regular classroom, and we can get a sub but it’s rare that the sub is a music person. We’re super blessed to have her. This is her first year and we’re happy to have her as part of our team.”

This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: Gadsden City band to march in Philadelphia parade