Written by Ben Cox – When you think of serving your country, images of soldiers in fatigues, carrying heavy packs and weapons spring to mind. Maybe warships and submarines, or fighter planes and parachutes enter your thoughts.

Those are not the only ways men and women serve this country, however. One local man spent an entire career serving his country with his voice, as part of the Army Field Band.

Jeff Woods is familiar to many who have seen the musicals put on by the Brownwood Lyric over the years, and is a member of the cast of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. He currently makes his living doing carpentry work and repairing homes in the area.

Woods, onstage with Jonathan Harvey and Bed Sword in Guys n Dolls (left), and in My Fair Lady (right)

Woods career with the military started almost by accident. “I taught music for three years, when I got a call from a college roommate. He had gone to DC, and I knew he was in the Army, singing. He says that one of their basses retired and I needed to audition.”

After a rigorous audition process, including “a chat with a recruiter to see if I was eligible to join the military”, he entered Army life in the fall of 1987, only a few short months after getting married to his wife Karie.

After going through basic training, he was a soldier first as are all military band members, he got to his posting with the Field Band in Fort Meade, Maryland in early 1988. “The Field Band is one of three premier bands in the Army. We have a public relations mission, we worked directly for the Chief of Public Affairs at the Pentagon, to take the story of our great Army to the Grassroots of America.”

The Field Band has several smaller groups that are part of the organization, an orchestral section, a choral section, a “Big Band” style group, and others that travel across the country performing.

Woods with the Choral section of the Field Band, he is in the back row, 4th from the right

Woods spent almost a third of the year on the road, performing for crowds that wildly varied in size. “We played everywhere, from the Kennedy Center to a middle school gymnasium in Alaska.”

Woods says his experience with the field band left him with the ability to sing a variety of music, often times in the same show “I’ve done everything from Johnny Cash’s ’I Walk The Line’ to operatic arias by Mozart and Verdi.”

When asked how he felt seeing veterans stand while the field band would perform the five branch’s songs, Woods got goosebumps describing it. “Humbling. It is a very humbling thing. These are guys who have gone out and laid it all on the line and come back, some of them with out all of their limbs. None of them have come back unchanged. We were just trying to give back to them a little piece of something that they gave to the country.”

The US Army Field Band, choral section and orchestra section, prior to a concert during Woods time with the group

Woods also says that this holiday in particular was a high demand for the Field Band. “In 20 years, I never spent a Fourth of July at home. But, I have seen some of the most amazing fireworks displays!”

Performing on the Fourth also presented Woods with interesting challenges, at times. “We were playing one year at the Gerald R Ford Library in Grand Rapids, and just across the river they had the fireworks. And oh, the bugs… They were terrible. I hadn’t been in the band two or three years, and I was singing a solo, Mozart I think, and a bug flew in my mouth. And there was nothing else to do but chomp, swallow, and go on and that was the NASTIEST tasting thing that has EVER crossed these lips!”

The only state Woods did not visit with the band was Hawaii, but he has been to the other 49 and enjoyed seeing the pride and patriotism that would swell in the audiences across the nation while watching the Field Band.

While he would never compare his service career to others who fought, Woods holds his head high for the part he played in the nations military after retiring in 2008 as a Master Sergeant. He is proud to have been a member of the Field Band, and sees them perform whenever he can. He can be reached through Facebook, and his workshop is at his home in May, Tx.