PANAMA CITY — The beauty of Bay County’s beaches soon will be preserved in song thanks to a new project led by Bay High School band director Nick Efstathiou.
While searching the school’s more than 80-year-old music library, Efstathiou stumbled across a musical nod to the area’s sugar-white sand originally published by the Bay County Chamber of Commerce in the late 1960s.
While only pieces of the song, “The World’s Most Beautiful Beaches,” were uncovered, Efstathiou now is working to create a musical score for the march. The goal, he said, is to make it a performance fixture for Bay High’s Million Dollar Band.
“It could be something huge for us,” Efstathiou said. “Hopefully we can make it one of our traditional repertoire pieces and just build the tradition back up.”
After gaining permission to use the song from local chamber officials, Efstathiou began transferring information from the yellowing music sheets into a software program that aids in the songwriting process.
Once completed, the song, originally composed by C. Milton Davis, will offer a unique ode to the area, one that not many cities possess.
“I don’t know many cities where they have a march dedicated to it,” he said. “ ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’ is a march dedicated to the United States, but there aren’t many cities with marches.”
As one of the oldest band programs in Florida, the Bay High Band music library is home to more than 2,000 pieces dating back to the 1930s. The small room filled with file cabinets near the band’s rehearsal space houses pieces performed by more than eight decades of Bay High musicians.
“There’s a lot of old music in there,” Efstathiou said. “Some was purchased in the ’30s and ’40s, some is just falling apart and I don’t know how to preserve it. The time, the humidity — it’s just tearing it apart.”
“The World’s Most Beautiful Beaches,” however, will have a second chance. The band will perform the revamped version of the piece at an upcoming assessment and also at a Marina Civic Center concert April 18.
Since taking over as band director nine years ago, Efstathiou has helped rebuild the program from 30 members to about 150. He keeps interests piqued with frequent performance trips, the most recent to Chicago, where the band performed in the city’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
“I like to think outside the box with everything when it comes to the band,” he said. “For them to be lifelong learners is really the goal, and through music we can create that.”
