Hughie Stone Fish wanted to give back to the city that inspired his musical career.

He reached out to people in Syracuse — including city leaders, restaurant owners and dancers — with the goal of highlighting their contributions to the community.

“No matter where I go, no matter where I roam, the 315 will be my home.”

These are lyrics from “Welcome to Syracuse,” a song Stone Fish, a songwriter and music producer in the comedy boy band Lewberger, released earlier this year.

Now Stone Fish is planning to bring the band, which was a recent finalist on NBC’s “Bring the Funny,” to play shows in the city. Along with the music video, he is currently developing a master class musical comedy workshop that he hopes to bring to SU.

Incorporating Syracuse into his musical and creative agenda is Stone Fish’s way of expressing his love for the city.

Among those featured were Black Reign Step Team from Syracuse University, the Central Village Boys & Girls Club, the Jamesville-Dewitt Good Time Singers and the Destiny Nation African Church.

“My goal was to spotlight these people who are out there in Syracuse every single day making the city a better place,” Stone Fish said.

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Stone Fish grew up in DeWitt, where he joined a comedy band in high school and played shows in Syracuse and Onondaga County. Stone Fish attributes the community for helping him develop a love for music.

“There were so many great opportunities for young musicians to play shows and to get recognition,” he said.

After leaving central New York to attend school in Boston, Stone Fish said he adopted a deeper worldview through his work in theater and social justice. His work ultimately led him to Los Angeles, where he currently resides.

Throughout his work, he has learned about the world and the ways in which the country is set up to make it difficult for certain people to thrive.

This knowledge, he said, has brought him closer to Syracuse, which was listed as one of the top 10 cities in the nation with the highest poverty rate in 2018. Growing up, Stone Fish said his eyes were closed to what was happening right down the street from him.

“It’s part of the reason I’m so passionate about trying to bring awareness to some of the socio-economic problems that are happening in the beautiful city of Syracuse,” he said.

Before shooting the music video for “Welcome to Syracuse,” Stone Fish met with as many people as he could who he thought might want to be involved in the project. He said that a number of people and organizations, many of who are featured in the video, were immediately on board.

The Black Reign Step Team at SU was one of them. Soon after Stone Fish reached out to the team on Twitter and met with Assata Cradle-Morgan, Black Reign’s vice president of external affairs. It was then confirmed that the team would be featured in the video, dancing to a fiddle solo.

The experience was new for the step team. First, they had never been in a music video before, and second, they had never stepped to the fiddle before. When Stone Fish sent them the track they would be stepping to, Cradle-Morgan said the team’s response was “wow.”

“We’re used to sometimes staying in our comfort zone. We’re used to doing the same thing, same type of music, so it was fun to do something new,” she said.

Eight members of the team, including Cradle-Morgan, met inside Schine Student Center last fall where they performed next to a colorful mural across from the box office. Cradle-Morgan added that the lighting, camera crew, sound checks and “take-twos” made the whole experience surreal.

Giselle Bookal, Black Reign’s vice president of internal affairs, said she enjoyed seeing the team alongside other important groups and people in the Syracuse community recognized in the music video.

Making an appearance in this community-based project made the team feel like they were beyond a group of college students stepping for fun, Bookal said. They felt like they were a deeper part of the Syracuse community.

“We really appreciated (Stone Fish’s) message of trying to show that Syracuse is a really diverse place,” Bookal said. “It’s a lot more than this negative construction that people think of it as.”

Bringing music and comedy together to convey deeper messages about social injustices is a concept Stone Fish became familiar with about six or seven years ago. He became familiar with this idea when he began working in comedy at The Second City, an improv-based sketch comedy troupe in Hollywood.

“What’s beautiful about music is you can really control and adjust the way that people are feeling, especially when you add comedy to it,” he said.

Stone Fish collaborated on a musical comedy called “Afros & Ass Whoopins,” written and directed by Dwayne Colbert. The show ran at The Second City from fall 2015 to December 2016 and added more shows during its run.

Stone Fish, as well as fellow songwriter Keenan Montgomery, wrote the songs and lyrics for the musical, which is about the history of police brutality in America.

Colbert said he had been looking for someone to kickstart the musical comedy with, and people kept pointing toward Stone Fish. When they finally ran into each other at a mutual friend’s birthday party, Stone Fish agreed to assist as both songwriter and lyricist for the musical comedy.

“From there it blossomed into a beautiful working relationship,” Colbert said.

What Stone Fish and Colbert did next was put together different forms of storytelling, comedy and music as an invitation for people to talk about hot-button topics such as police brutality and racism.

Stone Fish said he hopes to bring “Afros & Ass Whoopins” to Syracuse, along with his other musical projects.

“I want to help and inspire and also show that the city inspires me,” he said.

Eva Suppa | Digital Design Editor

Published on November 4, 2019 at 12:13 am