A great Black marching band performance is not casual praise. It is labor as praise. Somebody had to arrange “9 to 5” for that instrumentation. Music
A great Black marching band performance is not casual praise. It is labor as praise.
Somebody had to arrange “9 to 5” for that instrumentation. Musicians had to learn their individual parts. Sections had to rehearse until they sounded like one body. Drum majors and directors had to shape the whole thing. People had to memorize music, drill movement, correct mistakes, repeat passages, and come back again. All of that work happens before Dolly Parton ever hears the first note.
And that tradition certainly does not begin or end with HBCUs. You can walk into Black high-school band culture and recognize the same instinct. A band hears Earth, Wind & Fire, BeyoncĂ©, Prince, Frankie Beverly, Michael Jackson, a gospel standard, a current hit, or something completely unexpected and says, in effect: we’re going to put some respect on this song.
Once on social media someone shared a group of student musicians being extremely casual about Earth, Wind and Fire. I couldn’t relate. I did not like the performance. Some of us come from the school where students are never casual about greats like Earth, Wind, and Fire that paved the way.
And when a Black marching band really gets hold of somebody’s song? Whew. The composer may recognize every note and still discover rooms in the house they didn’t know were there.
We practiced your work.
We learned your work.
We loved your work.
We honor your work.
We considered your work worthy of our discipline.
This is love. Here are your flowers. Thank you for loving us too.
About FAMU Marching 100
If you grew up around Black high-school marching bands and thought, Well, this is just what bands do, there is a good chance you were witnessing descendants of ideas that institutions like FAMU helped spread.
The high stepping. The tremendous brass sound. The showmanship. The marriage of popular music and marching music. The insistence that the audience should be entertained as well as impressed. The idea that halftime itself can become an event.
Foster helped turn that into an institution.
And FAMU became so influential that it earned a marvelous nickname: “The Most Imitated Band in America.” The band itself says its traditions helped establish standards followed by marching bands around the world.
They weren’t just famous around Tallahassee, either.
In 1989, France selected Foster and the Marching 100 to represent the United States in the Bastille Day parade celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution. They performed in presidential inaugural parades. They appeared on national television. Sports Illustrated named the Marching 100 the country’s best marching band in 1992.
And behind all that spectacle was something much quieter: practice.
One of the first women to play in the Marching 100, Norma Solomon White, later remembered rehearsing for such long hours that they practiced from when she “couldn’t see in the morning” until she “couldn’t see at night.”
Now go back and watch them perform Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.”
Suddenly that performance looks different.
You’re watching young musicians standing inside a Black musical institution more than a century old. You’re hearing generations of arranging, teaching, discipline and experimentation behind them. When those horns hit together and you think, Good Lord, nobody missed anything, that precision didn’t fall out of the sky.
They inherited a standard.
In fact, look at the Marching 100’s own motto. It includes “Perfection in MUSICIANSHIP” and “Precision in MARCHING.”
So when the Marching 100 takes somebody else’s song and decides to honor it, they’re bringing quite an inheritance to the offering.
