Drum Corps In The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

Every Thanksgiving, I make sure I wake up in time to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Not for the floats. Not for the lip syncing celebrity “performers”. I watch for the marching bands.

This comes as a shock to you, I know, that Kevin is so into marching bands that he would watch a televised holiday parade just for them. I especially enjoyed this year’s parade as groups like Fishers High School from Fishers, Indiana and Stoneman Douglas High School from Parkland, Florida, really outdid themselves.

Of course, my favorite marching units are the drum and bugle corps who show up now and again. As a long time performer and fan of the activity, I get literal chills when I see a drum corps coming into the frame in front of Macy’s, with enough sound output to drown out any of the TV presenters (sorry, Willard Scott, but that many G bugles blasting out Auld Lang Syne is going to make you invisible from an audio standpoint).

Speaking of G bugles, it’s appropriate that the first example I found of a drum corps in the Macy’s parade is a long time DCA and all-age staple, the New York Skyliners. This video is actually an audio only recording of the corps performing in their home concrete canyons, but it’s also fun to hear the voices of Lorne Greene and Betty White, who hosted the broadcast for NBC that year (1963? 1968? Both?). The audio isn’t the best quality, but that adds to the nostalgic feel of the recording.

The next group of videos I found were from when DCI and the various regional drum corps organizations, such as DCE, DCM, and others, formed what was known as the Macy’s All Star Drum and Bugle Corps. These groups were made up of performers from various drum corps from all levels of the junior and all-age activity. The fun part of these groups is seeing all the different uniforms of the represented corps, as well as the humongous sound these corps put out (again, apologies to Willard Scott).

It wasn’t until the 2000s that I found the next example of Macy’s drum corps fun. This time, it’s the Cadets (pour some out), coming off their 2005 DCI world championship, performing one of their classics, Swing, Swing, Swing from the movie 1941, first performed by the Cadets during their 1995 show, An American Quintet

The most recent drum corps performance in the Macy’s parade was a big one. Coming off their 75th anniversary in 2013, the Madison Scouts put together an Anniversary Corps the following year for the parade. The corps was made up of members from the 2014 competitive corps (in white) as well as alumni from throughout their history (in green and red). The Scouts were also granted the honor to lead in Santa Claus to finish the parade, doing so with a rousing holiday mashup of Pharrell Williams‘ Happy and Angels We Have Heard On High.

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade is one of two parades which are on my bucket list to perform in, the other being the Pasadena Rose Parade on New Year’s Day. If I could do those parades in a drum corps, it would be the best thing ever.