Junior Davis Ginn took to New York to march alongside Jimmy Fallon, giant Snoopy and other jumbo -Thanksgiving morning favorites at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

“I went onto the Macy’s website… Macy’s Great American Marching Band, and I just sent in a couple of clips of me just playing a couple of different concertos, and they liked it,” Ginn said about is appearance in the annual parade. “There was a couple thousand people from around the country that tried out and about 260 people made it in.”

When Ginn’s family received his acceptance letter on an otherwise mundane Saturday, Ginn recalls a big celebration that lasted until a dinner out.

“When we got the letter…I was just with my friend, and all of the sudden — we were just going up to the mail — and my whole family was there, and they were like Davis what does it say?… It was a really good day,” Ginn said.
This year’s parade began at 9AM on Thursday, November 23. Ginn compares the Macy’s parade to the Charleston Christmas parade that the Wando band marches in, only this time he was covering over three miles without breaks.

“That was like straining on the shoulders but definitely not on the emotions,” he said.

One of Ginn’s favorite moments of the parade was getting little opportunities to connect with the crowd.

“We saw people 30 floors up, and there was like one moment where they let us take a small break, like a couple seconds…and I got to wave to one person 30 floors up, and I gave them an air-high-five, and they air-fived me back, which was so cool,” Ginn said.

Having his family there for support made the parade all the more meaningful for Ginn.

“We were marching around at one point, and my parents they actually had gotten…a group of people, they had told them “oh my son’s marching in the parade” and they said “okay we’ll chant for him,” Ginn said. “I heard like 50 people calling out my name. And I was like what?”

The parade was a once in a lifetime opportunity, especially from a musical standpoint.

“The whole thing was really awesome. We marched to this drumbeat, which they called the street-beat, which was so catchy and like every beat was just so groovy — and the trumpets we had like our own call outs that we just added to it as the march went on,” Ginn said.

Ginn even met students from a plethora of other states that he plans to maintain friendships with.

“I made like 40 great friends over the experience…I’m definitely going to stay in contact. Over the summer we’re planning to go on like a road trip,” he said. “About 20 of us are going to get together in Atlanta and drive all the way to Ohio it’ll be like a really great adventure.”

For Ginn, the most memorable part of the parade came as the group finally stopped marching.

“I looked over to the right and left and saw all of my friends smiling, and on the big screen right there my face was going across the screen… And the biggest confetti machine you’ve ever seen in the world rained down confetti on us and then Santa Claus comes in right behind us,” Ginn said. “It was like something out of a movie. And I got all of the happiness everybody had, it teared me up a little bit.”