Dynamic black bands are Super Bowl Stalwarts

Long before Michael Jackson, Rolling Stones and Rihanna, there was Freddie Colston.

Colston was just a 20 -year -old student from Tiny Fairbanks, La, when he traveled to Los Angeles in January 1967. He had grown up in a home without internal plumbing, but now stayed in rich accommodation with about 180 other members of Grambling College Marching Band.

Soon they would be high in the field in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to appear in the halftime of the first Super Bowl.

“When we heard this crowd, it was like a spirit came into us, and we were walking in a cloud,” said Colston, 77, who played the cymbals. “Our step was higher and the pace was faster.”

In the decades before attracting the National Football Federation star to appear at the Super Bowl halftime – rapper Kendrick Lamar will head on February 9th at this year’s New Orleans – often based on dynamic bands from Grambling and universities.

Lamar has not said if he will have an HbCu band in almost 15 minutes, while Kansas City leaders and Philadelphia’s Eagles are recovered. But there will be a presence at Caesars’ superDome when Southern University, from Baton Rouge, La., Plays before Jon Batiste sings the national anthem.

Each Hbcu Marching band has its own style and appearance, with live costumes that often match school colors. But regardless of school, viewers have come to wait for an event with high -level choreography, dancers often ahead, and Trumpeters and drummers are swinging while blowing or hitting their organs.

“That The special style of performance has always been a wide appeal, and the course of bands and other musical groups has always been cultural ambassadors for black colleges, “said Steven Lewis, a music and art curator for the National Museum of African and the Culture of African. American basis.

The band of Grambling’s black students was invited to Los Angeles at the height of the political rights movement and a city that is still unfolding from the flames and chaos of Watts riots two years earlier. Some black leaders have asked university administrators to reject the invitation.

“There was an early feeling that it was a vacant gesture,” Lewis said of the Grambling invitation, which is now known as Grambling State University. “But this criticism has been going on for a long time, and it is something that the championship still has to work.”

After San Francisco 49ers General, Colin Kaapernick, repeatedly knelt during the national anthem in 2016 to protest racial injustice and followed an angry debate on patriotism and political rights, some black stars hesitated to execute the super. Bowl. In 2019, the NFL started a collaboration with Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s entertainment and sports company, which led to recent performances by The Weeknd, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and other prominent black artists.

Marching bands exaggerate HBCU overcrowding and pride, many of which were established shortly after the Civil War and incorporated the military march into their curricula.

The bands are student-recruitment tools, drawing attention to the Rose parade and presidential inaugurations, including the performance of the Mississippi Valley state university at last month of President Trump. Some groups compete with each other in events such as the battle of bands, giving an active sense of contemporary songs.

They also got the attention of football executives who want to entertain a new event. When the champions of the National Football Federation and the American Football Federation met for the first time, the Super Bowl was not yet named Super Bowl.

“I looked at these bands and it was the fact that it was more than just a band,” said Jim Steeg, a former vice -president of NFL’s special events, who oversees the Super Bowl for more than two decades starting in the mid -1970s. ‘He just watched different from everyone else. ”

Following the long -term president of Grambling, Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones, he decided that his band would play in the first show of Super Bowl, the musicians who exercised the university holiday break. In the 1960s, Colston said the practices of 5 am were not uncommon.

“They said,” We don’t reduce the shows, “Colston said.” “We’ll go anywhere.”

One day, Colston said, Jones gave a cash to a drummer with instructions to put $ 2 to each member of the band for spending allowance in Los Angeles.

When musicians flow into the half -time football stadium, Grambling joined the band of the University of Arizona, a mainly White School, to portray a United States map. The bands played “this is my country” for the finale as a sea balloons go up.

“We had to behave in a professional way, because it was a group of colored children in a white community,” Colston said. “We were representing our schools, our churches, the cities that come.”

HBCU zones were included in the following three Halftimes Super Bowl. After the murder of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1968, the director of the band Florida A&M created a thematic theme around American pride in the Super Bowl III in Miami next year.

George Quillet, a clarinet for Florida A&M, said that many of his colleagues initially disagreed with the concept of performance, but later changed their minds.

“We really rejuvenated because our leaders led us to the process of what we had to do” said Quillet, now 76.

Their emission included marching in a formation in shape like a flying eagle. Following the course of “US” letters, the students were immovable as speakers, with departments of President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address and the king’s speech “I Have a Dream”.

This Super Bowl is the 11th to be held in New Orleans: Southern University took a Mardi Gras theme in the half of the first super Bowl of the city in 1970 and Grambling paid tribute to Duke Ellington in 1975. Three years later, Southern He played a 12 -minute pregame routine.

Kenny Ricard, a southern clarinet who is now 67, said that before taking the field in 1978, band members recite the song they gave in front of each show: “Lift your feet, drive and hit, start thinking about the show “.

In these decades, the band’s bands were willing and reliable entertainment options for NFL, which was involved in the supply of creating a show that could entertain both a personal and television audience.

Starry Gates opened in 1993, when Michael Jackson stood still on stage for almost a minute of rough applause before singing a mixture of his favorite bumps with the ritual of the pyrotechnics. Steeg said the NFL had to strengthen the half time to keep their fans involved and away from confrontation on other networks.

As the A-Listers occupied the focus-the last two Super Bowls in New Orleans was led by U2 and Beyoncé-Hbcu bands began to take on a more complementary role. In 2007, Florida A&M supported Prince’s performance, providing background music under an elevated platform.

Shelby Chipman, who was then on the band’s staff and is now his director, said the prince’s agent had called on the band, asking him to play. His team sent music information so that the band would match the notes he would sing, but otherwise he gave him creative freedom for his dance routines and formations.

Prince’s team visited Florida A&M a few weeks before Super Bowl to see a rehearsal. The band practiced with the prince only once, less than 24 hours before the game.

“Normally with such performances, they give us the green light,” Chipman said.

Colston, who worked in the customer service for NFL’s Washington commanders, is still attending a GraMBling State home and relaying the memories of the first Super Bowl. He hopes that celebrities now dominate the scene know their story.

“We opened the door for them,” he said.