SBO+: There are countless examples of music teachers who daily demonstrate “Why Music?” This remembrance of one came from a former band student.
On Tuesday, June 9, 2026, Greg James made the hour-and-a-half drive home, as he had nearly every day for decades, having just completed his fiftieth year of teaching. On June 10, he passed away peacefully in his sleep. Fifty years on the podium. A thousand-year flood. A cancer diagnosis. The man so many believed was invincible walked into the unknown the way he had walked into every rehearsal of his life — bullhorn in hand — leaving behind a legacy of more than five thousand touched lives in band students alone.
There is no more complete a life than that.
The education profession speaks often of dedication. It appears in mission statements, accreditation reports, commencement addresses. But dedication, as Greg James lived it, was a decision renewed every day for half a century to give more than the contract required, more than his own body could reasonably sustain. He taught through cancer. He led through floods. He advocated through grief. And when the end finally came, it came only after the work was finished.
Greg James was the band director of Richwood High School in Richwood, West Virginia — a small Appalachian community where the economics of daily life are not abstractions. They are the heating bill that crowds out the instrument rental, the empty refrigerator that makes it impossible to concentrate on a quarter note. Greg knew this not as a statistic but as a lived reality. His response was not sympathy. It was structure.
Developmental research confirms what Greg knew instinctively: for children from unstable homes, consistent structure is a precondition for learning and belonging. For many students, the band room was the most stable system in their lives. The rehearsal started on time. The director was always there. No child was turned away for inability to pay, because Greg quietly covered the difference himself, without ceremony. Students did not know. He did not want them to because the moment a child feels like a charity case, the structure loses its power.
When the floods of June 2016 condemned the school building, he found a donated car dealership, set up chairs on the concrete floor, and held rehearsal. On schedule. One student said it plainly: “The only regular thing we have is band.” That sentence should be required reading in every college of education in this country. It tells us what music programs, and the people who run them, do for children in crisis: they hold the world still long enough for a child to breathe.
Music education significantly strengthens children’s social-emotional development — empathy, self-regulation, the capacity for meaningful relationships. These are human outcomes that follow a child into every relationship they will ever have. Greg knew this fifty years before the literature caught up to him.
His band performed at the Kentucky Derby, the Indianapolis 500, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the lighting of the United States Capitol Christmas Tree, among countless other famous venues across the United States and Canada. He was inducted into the West Virginia Marching Band Directors Hall of Fame. And across two decades, SBO+ named him West Virginia’s selection for its “50 Directors Who Make a Difference” distinction four separate times — the only director in America ever chosen that many times. That repetition was recognition catching up to a man who never stopped earning it.
So, what should music educators nationwide take from a tenure like this? Not a technique. Not a curriculum. A posture. Greg approached the profession as though the job description was a floor, never a ceiling. A teacher’s true obligation, he believed, ends only when the child no longer needs you. For some of his students, me included, that day never came.
A Chorus Line was his favorite musical, and at his own request, “What I Did for Love” played at his funeral; not as elegy, but as instruction. Won’t forget, can’t regret, what I did for love. Greg chose those words as his final lesson. He never treated his career as labor. He treated it as devotion. Every extra hour, every dollar quietly spent, every fight picked on behalf of a child who had no one else; he did not do these things because the job demanded it. He did them because love does.
Greg James did not retire. He did not ease toward the door in a comfortable diminuendo. He worked until the work was done, until the school year was finished, the band business settled, the new building walked, everything in order. Only then did he make the drive home, lay down, and rest.
Fifty years. A flood. A diagnosis. A bullhorn that never went silent. Ask why a man endures all of that and still finishes the year, still walks the halls one last time, still makes sure everything is in order before he allows himself to rest, and the answer is not complicated, even if it is rare. There was only one reason. Not the podium. Not the trophies, the Hall of Fame, or the four times this magazine printed his name. Greg James did what he did for the same reason a parent stays up all night with a sick child, or a soldier does not leave a fallen friend behind; because he loved them, and love does not clock out. That is the whole answer. That is the only reason there ever was.