They Studied It Like It Was a Virus
- Jeremy Earnhart
- 9 hours ago
- 3 min read
In Case You Missed It — December 2025
Last December, I wrote something that had nothing to do with staffing formulas or bond packages.
If you found this site through The Cost of Not Playing, or through the Denton and Prosper case studies, or through the argument that cutting music programs costs districts more than keeping them — that post is where this all actually comes from.
My degrees at the University of North Texas were first in music performance, then in music education. The Ed.D. in educational administration at Dallas Baptist University came long after — years after the classroom, years after the bandstand, years at Irving ISD and Arlington ISD and Music for All. The sequence matters more than people realize.
The academics who built the research base around music education's value came at it differently. Many reached the credentialing level of performance required for a doctoral program and stopped there. They never played three sets from 10 PM to 2 AM in front of a room that had no interest in going home. They never felt what happens when the bass drops and the horns hit and everything else disappears.
They Studied It Like It Was a Virus
And because they studied it from the outside, they never developed the urgency to defend it in language that administrators couldn't dismiss. The argument they made was always a cultural one — music is valuable, music develops the whole child, music matters. All of that is true. None of it survived a budget meeting.
The Cost of Not Playing could not have been written without playing What Is Hip for years as a younger person.
The person who understands what music does to a room, to a career, to a life was built on a bandstand. At Club Memphis in Addison. At the InterContinental Hotel on New Year's Eve 1999, at the Colonial, at the Bent Tree Country Club, the Dallas World Aquarium, at the Adophus. In six years of Tower of Power charts and 10 PM downbeats and handing the book to the next trumpet player at a gas station in Euless because L.D. Bell needed all of me and I had to choose.
That is not a story about the past. It is an explanation of the present.
In every place I have worked since those years — L.D. Bell, Irving ISD, Arlington ISD, Music for All, and now back in the classroom at Guyer — I talked about Soul Tsunami. Because it was that important. Because it never really left. Because the performer and the educator were never two different people.
The economic framework, the white paper, the case studies, the 50,000 reads — none of it exists without the years on the bandstand. The urgency to make the argument in terms a CFO could not dismiss came from knowing, in my hands and my ears, exactly what was being lost when a district made the wrong call.
The band is back.
Nearly twenty years later, Soul Tsunami & the Hurricane Horns plays again — Friday, May 8, Community Beer Co., Dallas, 6:00–9:00 PM.
If you want to understand where this platform came from, read the December post first.
Then come out on May 8!
— Jeremy Earnhart, Ed.D.