Tony James at Fanny’s House of Music
The “Nashville way” is to grant celebrities their anonymity. But lots of people make an exception for Tony James.
James holds a different type of celebrity as a beloved former host of the Disney kids’ show Out of the Box. The original viewers of the show, which ran from 1998 to 2004, are in their late 20s and 30s now, and may have been refreshed on James when he went viral on TikTok a few years ago. In 2019, the show debuted on Disney+, introducing children of the show’s original viewers to Out of the Box as well.
James tells the Scene the recognition is constant, but he feels sincerity from each “Box kid” he meets, and is conscious of the fact that they feel a connection with him.
“I take that very seriously,” he says. “I get it. Genuinely, I care, because even as we were doing it — I didn’t know it would extend all these years — but I took very seriously that I was speaking to children and I was making a direct connection with them through the lens.”
In the late ’90s, Disney was looking for a musician who was primarily a percussionist — even better, a junk percussionist — who had experience working with children. This musician would star (along with Vivian Bayubay, whom James calls “magical”) on a new show aimed at preschool-age children. They would make crafts, sing songs and act out skits.
Sitting in front of Disney executives to discuss the gig, James had to laugh.
“I was like — this is not arrogance — I’m laughing because what you just described is what I do,” he says.
James was uniquely qualified for the role as a trained musician, starting at LaGuardia High School in New York City. (He attended while Fame, which was based on LaGuardia, was being filmed.) He later attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he focused on percussion. He had a successful career as a session and touring musician after college. Then James was part of the original Broadway cast of Stomp!, where he performed percussion (using brooms, trash cans and other found objects) combined with acrobatics, dance and pantomiming. He gained experience working with children at New York City’s Urban Youth Theater.
James says Stomp! expanded his mind and foreshadowed his experience in children’s television. He got to know Fred Rogers when the iconic children’s television figure visited the set of Stomp! for his show, and later when the Stomp! tour visited Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood in Pennsylvania. Rogers had reached out about collaborating with James on a project, but it never came to fruition. So when James booked Out of the Box, he called Rogers to share the news.
Like Rogers, James is similar in real life to his on-screen persona. He’s attentive when he meets a fan, seeing it as a two-way interaction — not just someone meeting a childhood hero.
“If we’re going to speak, I want to really be present,” James says. “That is just natural. It’s not forced. It doesn’t drain me, because it’s not forced.”
He’s honored that people hold the show so dearly, and he knows now the impact of being a Black lead on the network — both for kids of color to see someone who looked like them, and for white children who didn’t see a lot of people of color in media.
“People will say to me, ‘I grew up in a town [where] we didn’t see anyone that looked like you, and if we did, it was portrayed in a certain way, so you were my first exposure to something outside of my typical culture,’” he says. “How much love they have, and how much affinity they have is — goodness gracious — what a gift to me.”
James has lived in the Nashville area since 2010, when he relocated from Los Angeles. These days, he applies his love for combining music with visual elements on tour manning a live-feed handheld camera — which requires a “dance” with the artist onstage, as he describes it. He has worked with Beyoncé, Keith Urban and, more recently, another “Box kid” — Maggie Rogers, whom he calls a “dynamo.”
“I’ve been showered with so much love, so many things that you wouldn’t expect from a kid coming from the projects in New York,” he says.
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