Silky Smoove Drumline: The Beat That Holds Them

In Louisburg, a husband and wife have built a community drumline out of old band friendships, borrowed practice fields, and a stubborn belief that no child is too far gone to find the beat.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, just after 6pm, you might hear a steady beat coming from the JPAC at Louisburg College. You’ll find kids and adults of all ages, drums in hand, the passion for percussion uniting them all. Ashley Rodwell can tell you what those drums have meant to nearly everyone holding a pair of sticks.

Ashley Rodwell is the co-founder of Silky Smoove Drumline, a community drumline group that she started with her husband, Justin. Silky Smoove has spent the past few years marching through Christmas parades, homecomings, cookouts, and even funerals across eastern North Carolina.

Ashley was born and raised in the area, and she says music was part of her long before the drumline existed. When she met her husband, Justin Rodwell, she finally found someone who loved music as deeply as she did. "He's the instrument person, and I'm the music person," she says. "We both make music."

His road to the drums was harder than most. As a boy, he was bullied because of his legs, and the problem kept him out of the marching band. After he broke a leg on the playground, doctors broke and straightened the other, and he spent close to six months in a wheelchair. He joined the band after recovery and he has never really left. "He lives it and he breathes it," Ashley says. "His home is drums."

Around 2021, Justin started talking seriously about a community drumline. "It could be crazy, but it could work," Ashley remembers thinking. He called up his old marching band friends, and she knew the moment they sat down together that it was happening. She established the nonprofit and took charge of the paperwork while he took charge of the drums.

Justin Rodwell leads a practice session.

Silky Smoove made its debut at the Louisburg Christmas parade in December 2022, its members dressed in matching letterman jackets. Nobody was quite sure how the day would go. Afterward, the mayor told Ashley the group reminded him of his own school days. From that day on, she says, her husband has been glued to the drumline, and so has she.

The line welcomes kids with a passion for an instrument and kids who have never touched one, and Ashley jokes that it is open to anyone “from six to one hundred.” Her young cousin joined at six knowing nothing about music. Now he is ten and can play every drum on the line, although he is still too small to carry the heavy quads.

Ashley has noted that many of the kids drawn to drumming are wrestling with something that the adults around them tend to overlook. For them, the drum line becomes a safe space for the kids to let it all out. Before he started, her cousin was constantly on the move, but the drums settled him. "It was like his medication," she says. "It might look hard, but it just takes patience and time."

Some of the children don’t want to go home when practice ends, and Ashley notices. She says she sees a little of herself in them. When a child is struggling, she talks with school counselors, with family members, and with anyone else who might help. "I talk to whoever I need to talk to," she says. "I try to step in and do what I can."

The drum line also asks something of its members off the field. Parents must share report cards, and failing grades can mean sitting out a performance or excercise at practice. "They hate the push-ups," Ashley says. College band scouts come out to practice. Six members have earned scholarships so far.

For a drumline, the hardest thing to find is a place to play. Silky Smoove has practiced in a Spring Hope community center, which the group repaired and painted in exchange for the space. It also spent close to two years at Terrell Lane Middle School, where the members came to feel like family.

When the group lost that space after an incident involving people outside the program, Ashley thought her husband might finally call it quits. He did not. "I’m not letting go," he told her. "We're going to the park." They practiced outdoors through summer heat and winter cold, and Ashley made sure water, rest, and safety came first. "That's how you know he really loves it," she says. "If it's a hundred degrees outside, he's still going to push."

Keeping Silky Smoove going takes nearly everything the couple has. Justin drives a tractor trailer, sometimes working thirty-six hours at a stretch, and then he heads to practice anyway. On a short getaway to a lake near Sanford, he announced on the second day that he had to go back for practice. "There's no escaping it for him," Ashley says. 

Most of the money comes from their own pockets. The couple recently bought twenty-five new drums, and they often pay for rides so members can get to practice. Few families pay the modest fifty-dollar fee, and only a couple of parents regularly stay to help. "We have to be parents too, not just the drumline," she says. "Whenever somebody's with me, they're mine anyway."

To many of the members, her husband has become a big brother and a father figure at once. When a child calls to say there is no ride to practice, he finds one, even if that child lives forty-five minutes away. When something goes wrong at school or at home, the kids know whose number to dial. "At least they know they have somebody that cares," Ashley says.

Ashley’s children have grown up on the line. Her son played for a while before finding other passions, and her daughter is a majorette who sometimes picks up the cymbals or the tenor drums. On this line, girls drum and anyone can play whatever they want.

Ashley admits the work can be exhausting, and there are nights when she is tired enough to quit. Then she thinks about the six-year-old who could not sit still and now plays every drum on the line. She thinks about the teenagers who left for college with band scholarships in hand. "I feel amazed at the things we've done and created for these kids," she says. "The end of it all makes it worth it."

Ashley's advice for anyone starting something similar is simple. Be patient, pay attention, and trust that the reward comes at the end. "Just don't give up on kids," she says. "Do whatever it takes."

This fall, the drums will start again on practice nights in Louisburg, just before the sun goes down. Somewhere in the line, a child who arrived quiet will find the beat and hold on to it. For a little while, everything else will fall away, and that child will know exactly where they belong.

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