Tatum Music is home.
An August 2021 fire at the music store at 301 N. High St. in Longview sent the business scrambling to a temporary home further south on High Street.
Renovations took longer then expected, more than two years. The work is now complete, with the store moving back home to a larger and improved space.
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Tatum Music will celebrate its re-grand opening 9 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday , just a few months after the businesses’ official 75th anniversary.
“It was a horrific thing, but we’re better because of it,” Doice Grant said of the fire. Grant is the third owner of Tatum Music Co.
Alto Tatum, a former award-winning Gladewater band director, started the company on Aug. 15, 1948. In 1969, Tatum recruited Grant’s father, Neil Grant, who also was a recognized band director to join the business. Tatum later recruited Grant’s son, Doice, who also was an award-winning band director.
Over the years, the business expanded to Tyler as well, but its reach goes far outside the two cities with its program that sends representatives to more than 100 schools on a weekly basis to transport instruments back and forth to Tatum’s repair shop or deliver other goods and services to the bands. It’s a system Alto Tatum started.
He retired in January 2000, when Neil Grant became sole owner. Doice Grant joined the business in 1992 and became part-owner in 2004. When his father retired in 2010, Doice Grant became sole owner and president.
Tatum and his father ran a great business, Doice Grant said, and he said he was lucky to have worked with both of them for a decade, to be a part of a business that all three of them had worked at at the same time.
“They planned it,” he said. “It wasn’t an accident.”
The location that has been Tatum Music’s home since 1981 now showcases an updated store that’s 9,000 square feet larger with modern facilities and technology.
“We would never be in this beautiful place if it weren’t for that fire,” Doice Grant said.
The business took in a paint store next door that lost everything in the fire and a dentist office that closed during the pandemic. That allowed Tatum to provide improved and larger office spaces for Tatum Music’s office and for the representatives who visit band directors across East Texas every week. It also allowed for more space to display merchandise.
The whole business is heated and cooled now, and Tatum Music was able to consolidate items from an off-site warehouse into the building, making the repair shop, in particular, more efficient, Doice Grant said.
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A new, covered dock at the back of the store was added, along with a separate room at the back where the loudest pieces of equipment used to repair instruments are contained.
Maintaining an inventory of instruments, including the large ones that the band programs typically purchase and provide for students to use, such as sousaphones, is part of what sets Tatum Music apart.
“I order (inventory) in advance and put it on the shelf,” Doice Grant said, which is unusual in the industry. Most stores, he said, “drop ship” instruments when they’re ordered. That puts the band programs at the mercy of the manufacturer and what it has available.
The store sells to individuals, offers a rent-to-purchase program used widely by beginning band students across East Texas and a repair program.
“Our industry is service,” Grant said. “It will never die because you’ve got to have service.”
A side benefit the store offers is a program in which the former band directors who work as road representatives in the store provide complimentary clinics to help local bands.
“It’s our three-legged stool,” Doice Grant said of Tatum, his father and himself and their knowledge as former band directors.
It’s why the business weathered the fire so well, he said. The band programs are loyal because of the service Tatum Music has provided them over the years, and customers were patient.
He also credited the staff and the community. There were so many people who offered to help, Doice Grant said he had to turn some of them away.
“That’s when you know you’re in the right town, when you have that many people who tried to help,” he said.
Instrument repairs were delayed while the equipment was relocated, but the rest of the store didn’t miss a beat.
Grant used Cox Builders to renovate Tatum Music.
Saturday’s grand will include music by the McGowan Jazz Combo, finger foods by Deb’s Downtown Cafe and giveaways.
The day will culminate with a concert in the parking lot by the East Texas Symphonic Band, featuring two marches Doice Grant had commissioned for the event: “Diamond Jubilee,” by band member Kenny Goodson, and “Tatum’s 75th Regimental March,” by Timothy Rhea, director of bands at Texas A&M University. Grant’s father will direct the march.
