LOXLEY, Ala. — When Dale BeVier puts on his dress shirt, cummerbund and tie, and his wife Helen puts on a sparkly dress, you expect that the Loxley couple is going out for a night on the town.

Well, you’d be partly right.

The BeViers are the founders of the City Rhythm Big Band, a band that plays out of the Loxley Civic Center. Dale plays piano, and Helen is the band’s vocalist and “band mother.”

According to the band’s Web site, cityrhythmbb.com, the City Rhythm Big Band has 18 members and, “We play music from the Big Band era made famous by such artists as Count Basie, Woody Herman, Glen Miller, Duke Ellington, and many others.”

The band’s next performance will be Saturday, Jan. 17 at the Loxley Civic Center. Admission is just $5, and Pat Crumby, according to Helen BeVier, “acts as our hostess. The band also has a group of ladies who decorate the tables for the dances, sell admissions and man the snack bar.”

The band got its start in 2004, Dale BeVier says.

“Joey Knight (the events coordinator of the Loxley Civic Center) is a former band director and he and I decided to start a big band. Helen and I had fronts, lights and charts,” said Dale BeVier

“Fronts” are the special music stands that display the band’s name or logo and “charts” are arrangements of big band music. The gear had been accumulated through a lifetime of playing.

Dale says, “I’ve been playing piano for 69 years.”

He says he got his start playing out for a dance band as a freshman in high school.

“I loved the big band sound,” said Dale.

Of course, the arrangement made for some tight time management, especially when the band would play after basketball games, and BeVier was the varsity team’s starting center.

“I had to take the shortest showers ever,” recalled BeVier.

He credits one of his first music teachers, a “Miss Cook,” with teaching him to read music. That came in handy when it was time to do the “charts” for the band.

The BeViers met in college, where Dale was studying optometry and Helen was majoring in speech and drama . Eventually the couple started making music and performing together. With another musician, a trio was formed, and the group started getting paying gigs. While Helen had “the usual piano lessons” of the time, she had to learn most of the instruments she plays.

One of the problems the group found was finding a vocalist.

“We could never find a singer,” said Helen BeVier. “I knew the lyrics to a thousand songs. So I told Dale I was going to take lessons.”

Part of the practice called for Dale to play his piano while Helen practiced.

“He told me, ‘Either I am going deaf or your are getting better,’” chuckled Helen.

Eventually, the trio became a duo, and the pair started playing Rochester, N.Y., area nightclubs and restaurants. In the meantime, the BeViers were raising four children, Edwin, Deborah, Doug, and Craig.

Then Helen decided to go back to school to get a degree in horticulture. It meant taking their two youngest with them and heading to Clemson University in South Carolina. Dale, reluctant to take another set of state boards after being out of school for decades, would leave his practice.

Dale built houses, and helped to found the “Orange Jam Band.”

“Oh, we were successful,” recalled Dale. “At the band’s first dance, we had 405 people.”

“We never had an empty seat, the dances were always pre-sold,” said Helen.

Helen eventually took a job with Longwood Gardens in Philadelphia. She later took a job with the Harry P. Leu Gardens in Orlando. The couple eventually settled in the area, to be near one of their sons.

“Loxley has been very good to us,” said Dale. “They let the big band rehearse and perform at the Civic Center at a very reasonable rate. We owe a great deal to the town.”

The CRBB is made up of a number of school band directors, both active and retired and other professional and amateur musicians. But the band is always on the lookout for promising young musicians to play with them.

“It’s nice to have youngsters,” said Helen, adding that currently, Josh Owens of Mobile is playing with the band.

“His teacher is our drummer,” said Helen. “He’s such a joy to have.”

But the CRBB is about getting people up to dance.

“In every set,” said Dale, “we have fast swings, slow swings, a waltz, a rhumba, a ballad, a cha-cha, a fox-trot and a samba or some other dance step.”

While both admit that keeping the band going is a lot of work, both get a charge out of seeing the band jell and the audience react.

“We’ve had a lot of fun with it,” said Dale.