Written by Ben Cox – With one semester down, Howard Payne’s new Band Director is looking forward to a bright, and growing future.

 

Returning to Howard Payne after a 39 year career teaching music at the High School level, Class of 1977 HPU graduate Frank Nelson is no stranger to the area.

Teaching the Band Leadership summer camp for the last 20 years, as well as teaching band in Bangs for a few years, Nelson says he’s “lived about a sixth of my life in the Brownwood area!” Nelson says it is a good feeling to be back in Brownwood. “I’ve enjoyed getting to know the students and reacquainting myself with this community.”

When asked if he was looking to make the move back to Brownwood or if HPU reached out to him, Nelson replies “Neither one, actually! I was doing the summer camp this past summer, and I came back in July for the 50th anniversary of the Swingin’ Stingers and heard that Corey Ash was thinking about leaving after being approached by a church in Georgetown to be their music director. So, I threw my name in the hat and they called me within two days! After that it moved very fast, within a week and two days, actually.” His daughter also attended the school, from 1999 until the early 2000’s, graduating with a minor in music.

His career has take him across the state, as well as the country. “El Paso, Azle which is just outside of Ft Worth, a little town down in South Louisiana called Welsh, then to Colorado where worked on my masters and doctorate degree and also did some teaching while I was there, Amarillo, Mineral Wells, Temple, Bangs, Waco/Robinson and then ended my career in Belton.”

Nelson says an early influence is what steered him into musical education, and an unusual reinforcement of that decision from an unlikely source lead him back to it. “My high school band director influenced me to want to be a music director. Sometimes I did question that in my mind. I got out of the business for about a year, I went into restaurant management and after getting robbed at gunpoint I decided that maybe school teaching isn’t so bad!”

“I’m looking forward to a lot of additional growth in the band, right now we’re right around 42 or 43, but I could see it getting bigger pretty quick.” Nelson says the feeling of family is a large part of why he expects the band to grow. “It’s felt like a family when I was here, and I think that’s now thing people will see when they tour the campus is that family camaraderie rather than the acquaintances you might find at other schools.”