Midsouth Marching Festival is Saturday at Gadsden City's Titan Stadium
The Gadsden City High School Band is hosting the 58th annual MidSouth Marching Festival on Saturday, bringing high school marching bands from across the region to Titan Stadium to show their skills.
Gates open at noon and the opening ceremony is at 12:30 p.m. There are 23 competing bands from Alabama and Georgia, and performances will run throughout the day and evening. The awards ceremony is at 9:30 p.m., preceded by an exhibition by the host Gadsden City band at 8:40 p.m. and an exhibition by the Jacksonville State University Marching Southerners at 9 p.m.
General admission is $10. Children 3 and under are free. Concessions and vendors will be open throughout the event.
Prior to the awards ceremony for competing bands, Gadsden City Titan Band and Jacksonville State University’s Marching Southerners will take the field, exhibiting their 2022 shows.
The Midsouth Marching Festival is the oldest band competition of its kind in the southeastern United States. Referred to as the “granddaddy of them all” by former Gadsden City High School band director Steve Reagan, MidSouth started as a joint effort between the Emma Sansom High School and Gadsden High School band programs.
At the time, the Tri-State Marching Festival in Tennessee was the only marching band contest in the area. The band directors and parents of Emma Sansom and Gadsden High wanted to provide a competitive opportunity for their students and surrounding band programs, closer to home.
Booster clubs for both programs were interested, but hesitant to start for fear of losing money on the venture. Emma Sansom’s band director, Rip Reagan, spoke with his close friend, Bob Rush, about the plan. Bob told him not to worry about the funds needed, promising to financially back the marching festival and guaranteeing that neither band would lose money. Thus, with Rush’s generosity, the MidSouth Marching Festival was born.
The first order of business was to set an annual date for the festival. Rip and Bob consulted the Farmer’s Almanac and discovered the last Saturday in September was the date with the least likely chance to have rain. The last Saturday in September was chosen, and in 58 years, MidSouth has only been rained out one time. “There were a couple of years when we had MUDSouth,” Steve Reagan said, ”but we’ve only had to cancel (because of rain) one time.”
The 2020 festival was called off because of the COVID-19 pandemic, however.
In the early days of MidSouth, bands came from Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, and Mississippi to participate in the festival. A MidSouth Beauty Pageant would be held the weekend prior to the marching contest. The morning of the contest would begin with a parade downtown and a street competition where the bands would compete for the Mayor’s Trophy. The bands then would head over to Murphree Stadium for their field show performances.
As many as 40 to 50 bands would compete each year. Hotels would be booked for miles in every direction and were often so full that parents of the hosting bands, Emma Sansom High and Gadsden High, would house visiting band members that their homes.
Many bands make MidSouth a yearly stop on their marching band calendar. In fact, Arab High School has competed at every single MidSouth to date.
Fifty-eight years later, MidSouth is still going strong. It is the largest single-day event in Gadsden and continues to the be the main source of revenue for the Gadsden City band program. MidSouth truly is the “granddaddy of them all!”
This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: MidSouth, the oldest marching band festival in Southeast, is Saturday
