Kingsport Spirit

Kingsport is celebrating a milestone this year: the Centennial of the Dobyns-Bennett High School Band—100 years of music, discipline, school spirit, and community pride. For generations, the band has helped define the Dobyns-Bennett experience: representing Kingsport on a national stage, elevating parades and civic events, and setting the tone on Friday nights at J. Fred—but that wouldn’t come for another 16 years.

What makes this centennial especially fitting is that Kingsport’s first high school band emerged alongside a major turning point in local education: the opening of the new high school building on Wateree Street in 1926, when the school’s name changed to Dobyns-Bennett. In other words, as the city stepped into a new era with a new campus, it also invested in a tradition that would become one of the city’s most visible brands.

But transitions rarely happen in a clean line, and this clipping from the August 30, 1926, edition of the Kingsport Times captures that overlap. The announcement calls band members to a first rehearsal—yet the meeting place was not the new Wateree Street building. It was held at the older Kingsport Central site at Watauga Street and East Sevier Avenue, the city’s earlier high school location (now the Washington School Lofts). The message is practical and direct: show up, bring your instrument, and be ready to be evaluated and instructed. The band’s legacy, it reminds us, began with expectations and preparation long before it was amplified by stadium lights.

This centennial also invites honest historical context. In the era of segregation, Kingsport’s main high school served white students, while African-American students attended Douglass School until desegregation was achieved in 1966, when Douglass closed and remaining students were integrated into Kingsport’s other schools—including Dobyns-Bennett.

So this image does more than document a rehearsal notice. It anchors a larger Kingsport story: a new high school opening on Wateree Street in 1926, a band taking shape at the old Central campus on Watauga and East Sevier, and—over time—a community moving toward a single, shared student body. One hundred years later, the music continues, carrying both tradition and progress forward, one rehearsal at a time.