News

National school band leaders honor Shelton with top award

Fran Shelton

By Bill Moss, Published: June 30, 2024

A national school band leaders association honored Fran Shelton, the former Hendersonville High School band director, with a top award expressing "high esteem, respect, appreciation and gratitude" for a band director's "outstanding personal contributions to the school band music movement."

Shelton received the Edwin Franko Goldman Award from the American School Band Directors Association at the organization's biennial convention this past weekend in Minneapolis.

Shelton conducted the Hendersonville High School band for 28 years. She was inducted into the North Carolina Bandmasters Hall of Fame, becoming the youngest band leader to be honored by that organization and the fourth woman.

"They called and told me," she said of how she learned, last August, of the honor. "It's for the entire United States, which is pretty cool. One of our past state chairs nominated me. Every state nominates and then it goes to the past presidents of the organization. This is the largest school band organization in the country and the past presidents revew all the applicants and they chose one. I was just blown away and still am even though I knew that I was getting it."

Although she had known about the honor for 10 months, she was moved when she took the stage to accept the award. She reminded her peers that a successful band program is possible only with hard-working musicians, student leaders, fellow teachers, administrative support and band parents.

"It takes everybody," she said. "It takes a true village to produce a band program."

A Hendersonville native and 1977 graduate of Hendersonville High School, Shelton was only the third band director
in a 67-year span of the school’s much-decorated music program, following Jim Stokes and Earl Martin. After graduating with degrees in elementary education and music education from Mars Hill College, Shelton earned a master’s degree in music education from Appalachian State University. She taught band at Robbinsville High School for five years before returning to Hendersonville in 1987 to teach at HHS and Hendersonville Middle School.

“I taught Fran from the sixth grade on,” Stokes recalled in a Hendersonville Lightning feature when she retired in 2015. “She’s an excellent student, very talented. She’s just one of the best. The teachers always like to have a student like her.”
Stokes recalled hearing from Mars Hill's director of bands, Ray Babelay, about the diminutive trumpet player who had enrolled in college.
“He called me one day and said ‘this is the most determined little gal I’ve ever taught,’” Stokes said.

Ken Kraus, an HHS classmate of Shelton’s who sent all 10 of his children to her classroom, was an admirer of Ms. Shelton and, as an accomplished trombone player himself, an occasional volunteer coach of the brass section.

“She’s been such a good coach over the years,” Kraus said in 2015. “Watching her with the marching band was pretty incredible. She would take a 20-piece band into these competitions and scare the bejesus out of these 120-piece bands. That’s because she was very, very good at her craft. She’s not only a good teacher but she was a great coach.”

Under Ms. Shelton's baton, the school symphonic and marching bands performed at the Billy Graham Congressional Medal Ceremony, the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, the Gator, Sugar and Orange Bowls, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Hall in Boston, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Chicago Symphony Hall, the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Los Angeles, Disney World and Atlanta Symphony Hall. In September 2011, School Band Orchestra magazine featured HHS as "A Small School with a Big Band"
A past president of the North Carolina Bandmasters, Shelton also serves as tour director of the North Carolina Band Ambassadors, leading high school musicians on performing trips to Europe every two years and is musical director of the Asheville Community Band.