The Hillsboro Story cont’d

The Hillsboro Story
The Hillsboro Story is a big story about a little town in Ohio, fifty miles north of the Mason Dixon Line, my hometown. I grew up in a modest middle class ranch style house on the edge of town and ran around like the world was my oyster. On the other side of town “colored” kids lived in their world, a mysterious place because, although we shared territory, our worlds were separate. Then Brown v. Board of Education came along in May, 1954; and that separation was legally challenged in the biggest national turning point since the Civil War. America was asked to “integrate.”

The Hillsboro Story is an account of those times, from the perspective of an eight year old in the center of the cultural commotion and through the voices of the people who took those first bold steps in her hometown in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement.

In a masterful collection of sounds and compositions, David Ornette Cherry’s The Hillsboro Story captures the place, the drama, the characters, the two worlds, and the moods of those edgy times. His response musically has been a powerful infusion to the narrative, culturally and creatively. David’s style is rooted in the free jazz being created around him as a child, in the garage bands in his hometown neighborhood in Watts, LA, in his high-stepping marching band at Locke High School that fused soul and rhythm, and in the world music arriving into his ears through his family travels and cultural climate of the 70’s and 80’s. He “integrates” jazz, classical, 50s film scores, folk sounds, and funk. His music tells its own story–magical, like memory. Cherry picking history, he is the Muse.

I invite you to take a journey, maybe to a small Midwest town in the 50s, maybe to your own Memory Place, where your imagination comes alive. Tune in and enjoy this evocative soundtrack, its sophisticated spirit and narrative flow.

– Susan Banyas, author, The Hillsboro Story