Marching Bands at HBCUs

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have a long, rich history of music and performance. From the beginning, choral ensembles helped HBCUs gain prominence - and fundraise - while also serving as cornerstones of burgeoning music departments. The establishment of the Hampton Singers (1870), Fisk Jubilee Singers (1871), Tuskegee Singers (by Booker T. Washington in 1882), and Oakwood Aeolians (1946) tracks with decades of contributions to the American choral tradition; these ensembles continue to represent their institutions nationally and internationally. In more recent years, marching band programs have come to the forefront of many HBCU music departments with their high-energy, contemporary performance styles. While music historians have devoted increasing attention in recent years to HBCU choral ensembles and composers, HBCU marching bands remain understudied. Yet their impact on American culture has been just as if not more significant than that of choral groups.

Prior to the 1940s, HBCU marching bands emulated the militaristic style of other ensembles. But, under the guise of William P. Foster, a highly influential music educator in the history of HBCU music departments, marching band traditions began to absorb African dance techniques to create the style that we see performed today. In 1946, as Florida A&M’s fourth band director, Foster created the “Marching 100” band, marking the beginning of the modern-day HBCU marching band. Since then, other HBCUs also began to incorporate elements of dance and music celebrating Black culture and excellence. These ensembles often perform music from various genres associated with Black creativity, including jazz and R&B to gospel and rap, as well as covers of contemporary popular music.

In recent years, marching bands have become central to the culture of music and athletics on and around campus. At many HBCUs, marketing and recruitment efforts directed towards incoming students often include the use of the college’s marching band. Even if students aren’t involved in music themselves, marching bands at HBCUs have a history and culture of interaction with audiences and peers through signature movements and songs they perform. 

The relationship between HBCU marching bands and their respective athletic programs has a lot to do with the relevance and popularity of the bands. For instance, many bands that are affiliated with HBCUs in smaller, lesser-recognized athletic conferences, such as Virginia State University, oftentimes are not as popular as bands in larger, better funded athletic conferences regardless of their performance quality and style, such as Grambling State University or Florida A&M University.  

On HBCU campuses, marching bands are crucial to the aid in energy and traditions surrounding homecoming and football games. They are often the most anticipated part of homecoming parades, and prepare elaborate field shows for halftime at the homecoming football game. One tradition that is common among HBCU marching bands at football games is known as the Fifth Quarter.  The Fifth Quarter  takes place at the end of a football game, and features a dueling competition between varying sections of the marching bands of the respective teams that played. While a friendly competition, the Fifth Quarter is also a serious display of artistry and technique that serves as an opportunity for alumni, fans, students and families to analyze and appreciate the work of the competing band. At its conclusion, each band closes with a signature piece of music that is meaningful to the band and its fan base, with audience participation through singing encouraged.

Today, HBCU marching bands enjoy greater recognition across American popular culture than ever before. Well-funded and popular marching bands such as those at Florida A&M, Grambling State University, and Southern University have all performed at notable public events with large audiences. Such performances include, but are not limited to,  Super Bowl halftime shows , the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Rosebowl Parade, presidential inaugurations, and even in  documentaries  and  commercials . HBCU marching bands have collaborated with famous artists like Madonna, and have thus become the face of what the world sees in regard to music on HBCU campuses.

In starting our research on music departments at HBCUs, we were motivated to highlight the disparity between information that is readily available about music departments at HBCUs versus music departments at predominantly-white institutions (PWIs). Further, we wanted to focus on research that would provide more information on HBCU music departments beyond their choral traditions, which led to our focus on the marching band tradition. Because of its contemporary lens, we found less published scholarship on this topic than we expected. To compensate for that scholarly gap, we gathered much of this information through interviews with experts in the field, recent newspaper and journal articles, and dissertations of current band directors in the field.

Marching bands have played a significant role in establishing the music departments at HBCUs. The nature of our map centers around performances of HBCU marching bands with a focus on the schools that were nominated for and/or participated in the 2020 Honda Battle of the Bands. Our process focused on finding sources that discuss a variety of performances by these marching bands and using each performance as a point of reference on our maps. We also mapped the locations of each school. We made this map to demonstrate the impact and spread across the country of notable performances these schools put on. The map includes the option for viewers to see each school individually with lines connecting the school to their performances around the country as well as the world. While we did not seek to make a specific claim about the information we were collecting, we wanted to showcase the impact and spread of this musical avenue in this day and age. The map is not exhaustive and shows only the beginnings of a lengthy research project with hundreds of performances. Due to the current timeframe of this project, performances are ongoing and there are more to come so one cannot make a comprehensive final map now. We wanted to begin this research and demonstrate the role of marching bands in music departments at HBCUs in the hope that future students or scholars would deepen and nuance our initial work.

Considering the nature of our research being relatively contemporary, much of our data collection and content research was done in a more surface level fashion. Though we had a set list of schools and marching bands that we wanted to research, each school provided varying levels and types of information, with some providing no information of their own at all. Therefore, much of the information we found came from traditionally “non-scholarly” sources. These types of sources were still valuable to us as primary sources from stakeholders in the history of HBCU marching bands. Additionally, though we did not have any formal, published journal articles or books to base our research off of, the benefit to doing contemporary research is that we have a lot of media to include and to draw conclusions from. 

While the abundance of contemporary media offers advantages to the type of research we performed, the lack of any formal research or data collection done in the past did make the accumulation of a lot of relevant information seem somewhat disorganized. This disorganization led to issues in producing the maps themselves, as it is difficult to communicate information effectively through visuals when much of the information isn’t there to begin with. To remedy this, we worked to find this missing information piece by piece throughout the project, but this proved to be very limiting to our research due to a lack of time and resources.

These difficulties, however, allowed us ample opportunity to make hypotheses regarding the information we both were and were not able to find. For example, we noticed that the bands with the most information about their cultural and performance history tended to be the bands with the most well-known educators as well as the bands that appeared to be the most well-funded. We also had to make many conclusions and decisions ourselves concerning the data we mapped due to the lack of consistent information about our selected group of marching bands across the board. 

The first expert our team ambassador reached out to and had a chance to meet with was Dr. Tammy Kernodle, musicologist and professor from Miami University at Ohio. She helped us think about ways our project can be expanded on in the future and also helped make new connections with experts on HBCU marching bands. Dr. Kernodle suggested we incorporate athletic conferences into our maps. This could be done either through different layers or three separate maps showing schools that are a part of either the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA), Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC), or Mid-eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC). This could help show how conferences are represented relating to the marching bands we are focusing on.

Our team also reached out to Dr. Ethel Haughton and Mr. Harold Haughton, professors from Virginia State University. Mr Haughton was the band director at Virginia State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2003. Mr. Haughton commented on the role of the public's perception on marching bands and their performance opportunities. For example, Virginia State University didn’t know about the Honda Battle of the Bands until well after its founding. He also suggested we look into publicity, funding, and performance opportunities on a deeper level by comparing marching bands with the success of their football teams and players they produce. Lastly, Mr. Haughton mentioned the difference in repertoire between HBCUs and PWIs, which could be another interesting component of a map for this project.

Dr. Ethel Haughton, who received her Ph.D in Music history and titled her dissertation, Music in the Black and White Communities in Petersburg, Virginia: 1865-1900, provided feedback on the project as well (Harold Haughton is her husband). She mentioned that we could include where band directors from the schools we are including graduated from since so many current HBCU marching band directors are alums from the programs they are directing. Because of the lack of information on the bands and their directors, this would require significantly more research as well as reaching out to lots more experts than we had time to during the initial stages of this project. Dr. Haughton also suggested we compare the number of band directors who are alums of the HBCUs they direct at versus band directors and their alma maters at PWIs. 

When interviewing a musicology professor from Julliard, Dr. Fredara Hadley, she mentioned that in an athletic conference map we should mention that SWAC is the most dominant conference associated with band culture. Dr. Hadley also shared that we would need to make the distinction between larger well known HBCU bands and the smaller lesser known ones on our map. She also mentioned the role of HBCU marching bands as ambassadors for their schools, which is something that could be looked into further. One possibility would be to analyze the role social media plays in the popularity of HBCU marching bands.

Though the difficulties encountered in our research posed limitations, they also served to expose many holes in musicological research done in the past. Much of this missing history has to do with preservation, which speaks to the funding disparities we see between HBCUs and PWIs. This research also offers a valuable connection between the history of HBCU marching bands and the development and presence of music departments at HBCU institutions, and acts as a thorough starting point for further research to be done. Our research puts much of the histories and contributions of HBCU marching bands in conversation with one another in one accessible place, making it easier for future researchers to pick up where we left off.