Britt Small

A Skidmore, Missouri, musician. A paratrooper with the 173rd Airborne Brigade during The Vietnam War, Britt Small came home and became “The Musical Voice of America’s Veterans” through his band, Britt Small & Festival, and his traveling music therapy programs for veterans. Small passed away in his home in Skidmore, after having a heart attack on June 21, 2020. Born in Shelbyville, Indiana, and moving around to states like New York and Florida, Small’s life changed after he went to war and returned to a place of trauma and uncertainty. Small graduated from Northwest Missouri State University with a bachelor’s degree in music education, which he used to help other soldiers deal with the same issues he was experiencing. He would return to the college in the 1990s to obtain a degree in mass communication. In 1973, he formed Britt Small & Festival, a 12-piece patriotic band that toured the United States and Canada singing songs praising America and memorializing soldiers who fought at war. While they toured across the U.S., the band’s members had a defining moment in 1982, when a visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., reportedly turned from a rowdy protest into the crowd coming together in song. In 1984, the band returned to perform at the dedication of the Three Fighting Men Statue, which would later be re-created in the Oscar-winning Tom Hanks drama, “Forrest Gump,” where Gump speaks at the Capital Building.