Herman Boyd has created Echoes and Footprints a place that brings together the musical threads of the Americas. Delmarva Public Media's Jenny O'Connor has this portrait of the man and his work.
Do you ever wonder how music connects us, not just across towns, but across entire continents? Well, for Herman Boyd, a childhood spent soaking up live radio turned into an unexpected mission. I'm Jenny O'Connor for Delmarva Public Media. After years in I.T. and traveling all over the world, Boyd had a huge 'Aha!' moment. There's this amazing common thread running through music from all over the Americas, but no one place was really connecting the dots. So he decided to change that and created Echoes and Footprints, a fascinating project all about digging up and sharing the incredible history hidden right in front of our ears, in the music we love.
“It was a case of having traveled quite a bit and gone to other countries across the Americas. I started to realize there's some commonality in the sounds, in the music, and how people engage with the music,” Boyd said.
Boyd's early fascination with music was fueled by a constant stream of live radio. Growing up in South Carolina, he'd spent evenings listening to stations that played music from the Delta Region, Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, which all sparked his curiosity. As he grew up and continued a career in I.T., he found himself with the case of the travel bug, and the music was still the forefront of his interest, which led him to the striking realization.
“I realized there was no one place that had any information about these different music forms across the Americas. Although I recognize there's some similarities in the rhythms and the beats, I could not find a place that collectively said, 'Hey, this is the connection,’” He continued.
So Herman created this organization to educate different demographics on the roots of their favorite tunes. And he started big taking his first program to Los Angeles, California. He brought a bunch of the instruments he had collected over the years and presented to one of the hardest judging panels a first time presenter could face - high schoolers. Dun dun dun. And luckily for him, the feedback he received was refreshing.
“They were fascinated by the story. And one feedback I got at that time was, no one tells us this. We don't know this connection between history and music and how that plays forward. When you listen to the music and the beat, you're really listening to the history of the Americas,” said Boyd.
This feedback really motivated him to continue sharing this special kind of education with people who might have never heard about it otherwise. The positive feedback kept rolling in, including a particularly memorable moment with a classically trained musician who saw his show in an Arkansas Library.
“She came up to me and said, I'm a classically trained musician, and I know all about the history. I mean the music history and form and structure and everything. I never had anyone connect this music to history,” Boyd recalled.
But if even the classically trained musicians don't have access to this information, where is Boyd getting this from? Well, like I said, the man liked to travel.
“I've traveled directly to the countries and found the people. For example, we had a contact, just one person in Paraguay and this person saying, look, if you can meet me here, I can take you to this community. Where, the music form, there it's still practiced, and you can meet with this community,” Boyd explained.
So after diving into all those amazing stories and picking up tons of memories along the way, Boyd came back with a whole new way of looking at things, and suddenly his old favorite song sounded fresh, and he unearthed new patterns he hadn't noticed before. In the polyrhythms of familiar tunes like The Get Up by Blanco Brown, is actually a distant butterfly effect.
“As we talk more about the African diaspora, how a lot of the Polyrhythmic music came from Africa, the Get Up, that's a very much a polyrhythm call-and-response type of music. So it came with that population,” Boyd said.
And Echoes and Footprints partners with many different organizations and schools to help spread the word. If you're interested in learning about the history of your favorite songs, you can visit echoesandfootprints.com and read about it, find an event near you, or use their AI stem analyzing tool to take a hands-on approach at learning. And for Delmarva Public Media, I'm Jenny O'Connor.
