Maine bands to celebrate the past at R.B. Hall Day

LINCOLNVILLE – In the days before radio and cars, music played a different part in people’s lives.

Saturday’s celebration of R.B. Hall Day at Lincolnville Center’s Breezemere Park is a point of the baton back to those days, when just about every community big enough to call itself a town had its own band and looked to it for its musical entertainment, a time when sheet music, not a CD, was the hot musical commodity.

The free event, on the shores of Norton Pond, will feature the music of 14 community bands from Maine, including host town Lincolnville’s own renowned community band. The event is this year’s official R.B. Hall Day, at which Bowdoinham native Robert Browne Hall – a contemporary and, arguably, a peer of John Philip Sousa – will be remembered.

Grant Dinmore, a 63-year-old retired educator who now lives in South Thomaston, said community bands were an important part of community life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“It’s an old tradition, when towns had bands that played in parks,” and at special events, he said.

Dinmore is a member of the Lincolnville Community Band, in which he plays baritone horn. Before joining two years ago, he hadn’t picked up the horn since serving in the Navy 40 years ago.

But that don’t mean the Lincolnville group will sound – or look – like a bunch of retirees trying to recapture their musical youth. Members range in age from elementary school students to octogenarians.

“Last year we had an 83-year-old [member] retire,” Dinmore said.

A recent high school graduate member who plays trombone is heading off to the University of Maine at Augusta to study jazz. After Saturday’s performance, five members will travel to Waldoboro where they are performing in a top-notch musical theater production, according to Dinmore.

“A lot of them are pros,” he said.

The Lincolnville band’s repertoire is heavy on marches, such as those composed by Sousa and Hall, but the group also performs swing, show and pop tunes, and waltzes. The band is often seen performing on a flatbed trailer at festivals and parades.

“We really are a marching band,” Dinmore said, “but most of us couldn’t march,” he joked.

Many of the 13 other community bands slated to perform Saturday are better described as stage or concert bands. Each will perform for about 40 minutes, which means that people can come, sit and listen for an hour or so, or stay for the duration of the day.

But Dinmore says the event is really a nod to coronet player Robert Browne Hall (1858-1907).

Hall composed 62 marches that are available in score form, with names such as “Greeting to Bangor,” and “Fort Popham,” and was known as the New England March King.

“They’re fun to play,” Dinmore said of Hall’s marches.

Sousa included Hall compositions in his concerts, and Dinmore said Hall was especially popular in Great Britain. Today, the U.S. Navy Band plays Hall’s “March Funebre” at the funerals of U.S. Presidents and high-ranking naval officials.

To express their gratitude to Hall for directing their community band, Bangor residents presented him with a gold coronet, which is now housed in the Waterville Historical Society’s museum.

“If Hall had been born in Washington, Philadelphia or Chicago, he would have been far more recognized,” Dinmore said, “as much as Sousa.”

Dinmore expects a big turnout at Saturday’s performance, which begins at 8:40 a.m. and runs through the late afternoon, rain or shine. Last year’s R.B. Hall day was in Farmington, and drew hard-core band enthusiasts, he said.

Breezemere Park is located on Route 52-173 just south of Lincolnville Center village. Parking is free, and the site is handicapped accessible.