Booker T. Washington Remembers Elmer Davis: The Band Director Who Gave a Generation Its Sound

Tulsa is remembering Elmer Davis, whose name is inseparable from the band program at Booker T. Washington High School. For more than thirty years, he stood on that podium — and for three decades of BTW students, he was the person who taught them to hear music as discipline, as craft, and as something worth building a life around.

More Than Three Decades on the Podium

Davis didn't just lead the band. He built something that outlasted any single season — a program that alumni carried with them long after they left BTW's halls. Around 2005, a stroke threatened to end that work early. It didn't. With his wife, Katawna, managing his medical care, his household, and his rehabilitation, Davis returned to directing his students — a comeback that later led Oklahoma's Most Inspiring Couples to recognize the two of them by peer nomination, for a marriage and a partnership that had by then carried them through more than 40 years together.

That detail matters, because it's easy to talk about a band director's "legacy" in the abstract. Elmer Davis's legacy has a face: it's the students he mentored who grew up and became teachers themselves, who found — when they reconnected with him and Katawna years later — that the two of them had shaped not just a school year, but a career path. Multiply that across three-plus decades of students, and the actual size of what he built starts to come into focus.

A Lineage That Started Before Him

Elmer Davis didn't build the BTW band program from nothing — he carried forward something that already had deep roots. The school's band tradition traces back to 1942, when Clarence Fields — brother of the legendary Tulsa bandleader Ernie Fields Sr. — became band director and began mentoring generations of young Black musicians, several of whom went on to build real careers in music off the strength of the scholarships and training he helped them earn.

That's the tradition Davis inherited and carried for his own thirty-plus years: a Tulsa institution's music program, run for most of a century almost entirely by Black educators who treated a public high school band hall as a place where futures got built, not just where football halftime shows got rehearsed. Davis's decades on the podium are a continuation of that line — one more chapter in a history that deserves to be told with his name in it, not around it.

What Tulsa Is Left With

Elmer Davis has passed, and the Tulsa community — current and former BTW students, fellow educators, and the family he built with Katawna — is mourning him. Service and memorial details will be shared with the community as they're finalized.

What doesn't wait for those details is the plainer truth: a man spent more than thirty years of his life turning up, every day, to teach teenagers discipline through music — and a measurable number of them went on to become teachers themselves because of it. That's not a small thing to have done with a life. It's the whole thing.

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Sources

• Oklahoma's Most Inspiring Couples — Elmer and Katawna Davis
• From Tulsa to Broadway and Back — The Oklahoma Eagle (Clarence Fields / Ernie Fields Sr. band history at Booker T. Washington)