By BEN RATLIFF, The New York Times
HOUSTON — At four blasts of a drum major’s whistle, the Marching Storm, Prairie View A&M University’s 250-piece marching band, invaded the football field at Reliant Stadium here in columns spread evenly across 80 yards. It was halftime at the annual Labor Day Classic that pits Prairie View against Texas Southern University, and for many in the stadium it was the most important part of the game.
The joke about black-college football games in the South is that the crowd patterns are the reverse of the norm. The fans talk, flirt and eat during the first two quarters, then return to their seats to scrutinize the marching bands through their eight-minute shows at halftime.
The Marching Storm has had brushes with mainstream attention over the years. It has appeared in television commercials and in a Dallas Cowboys halftime show with Destiny’s Child. Yet it remains a source of local pride, uncontrolled by corporate interests; its budget is about a third of the football team’s. Along with other bands from historically black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.’s, it is an example of a robust vernacular American musical form that serves a social function and isn’t aiming at commercial success. It is one of many, all over this country.
And sadly, Prairie View A&M’s football team hasn’t been much to watch. Though it has improved recently, the team lost 80 games in a row during the 1990s, an N.C.A.A. record. The marching band is a different story.
In 20 years, principally through the work of the band director, George Edwards, and the majorette director, Margaret Sherrod, the Marching Storm has risen into the first rank of marching bands among H.B.C.U.’s. It pioneered a popular innovation with its drum section, in which the drumline puts on its own dynamic mini-show, and became widely imitated for its outgoing, high-stepping style.
“Especially in the last six years, the Marching Storm has been one of the top three bands in H.B.C.U. football,” said John Posey, a marching-band historian and publisher of Urban Sports News, a Texas-based monthly magazine that covers professional and college sports. “I consider them to be almost a miracle.”
But on a day in mid-August, they weren’t. “How many times I tell you to watch? Trombones, you dragging!” The scene was the band room of the Prairie View campus, 45 minutes northwest of Houston, during the first week of a summer boot camp. The director, Mr. Edwards — a compact, intense man addressed as Prof and characterized by most band members as an approachable, humorous but exacting father figure — was breaking in the band, including a pile of foggy freshmen. His concern was the coming halftime show at the game against Texas Southern, Prairie View’s biggest rival.
Mr. Edwards called for the national anthem, and darted around the big room as he listened to it, conducting accents for the trumpets, listening for pitch problems and signaling for smoother long-tones. He contained himself until the last curdled note.
“I’m gonna call security!” he howled. “Overblowing and not listening!”
Next he ordered the drumline — snares, tenor drums, bass drums, cymbals and the five-drum wraparounds known as quints — to start a cadence leading into the “Entertainment Tonight” theme song, the band’s fanfare. The line, which its members call the Box, was a little soggy, and Mr. Edwards stopped it in the middle. “Play the music! Play it!,” he shouted, his bald head blooming with sweat. “Gonna sound like that when you go to T.S.U.?” He let the players squirm for a moment. “It’s a new day, babe. New day.”
Tenfold Growth
Prof Edwards became band director at Prairie View in 1984, when the band’s roster was a meager 25. He had come up through the excellent Florida A&M University band in the late 1960s as a saxophone player and drum major, and took the Texas job on the condition that the school would increase the students’ band scholarships. It did, and the band has since grown tenfold.
It has taken a generation, but Texas is now full of Marching Storm alumni who direct high school bands; those directors and their bands attend Prairie View games and study halftime videos, bootlegged and sold, or viewable for free at Web sites like marchingsport.com.
But of course the band is more than just a band. Playing in it increases the motivation to succeed in school. (Students with a grade point average under 2.0 aren’t permitted to travel with the band.) It helps pay the bills. (A Prairie View education, including housing, costs about $6,000 a semester; band scholarships average around $2,000 a semester.) It helps students form a family in an isolated place. It makes them perfectionists. Ultimately, it can give them lifelong direction. A lot of old-heads, or upperclassmen, in the Marching Storm say they want to teach music or become band directors themselves.
“We do have personality clashes,” said James Durant, a saxophone player who became the band’s mascot, a panther. “If you put a television camera inside the band hall, following around members every day, you’d have the most-watched show in America. But the minute you put on a uniform, and walk out of the tunnel into a stadium, you are at war, and you’re not gonna go it alone.”
Of more than a hundred historically black colleges nationwide, Prairie View A&M University is among the oldest, founded in 1876. (Historically black does not mean exclusively black; currently there are two white students in the Marching Storm.) Most black college bands are “show style,” with different marching techniques and greater freedom of motion than the more military “corps style” marching bands of many other colleges. And within black college bands, the Southern ones are a breed unto themselves, fusing hot percussion and pyrotechnics with a balanced, rounded ensemble sound. (Mr. Edwards disapproves of loud, straining bands.)
“We have the great drumline and the high caliber of music,” said Tory Randle, a mellophone player in the band. “Up North, they’re just pretty. We’re mean, too.”
Black college bands began salting their repertory of marches and alma mater songs with radio hits in the 1960s, even adapting Motown dance routines. That trend escalated in the 1970s, the prime years of Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind and Fire. Later the bands covered hip-hop songs, their versions dominated by sousaphones and bass drums, their movements sometimes echoing popular dances from videos.
But especially since Southern hip-hop blew up commercially around 2001, the influence has started to go the other way. Now popular culture seems to be feeding off marching bands. In the last few years, especially, dozens of rappers and pop performers, including Kanye West, OutKast and the Ying Yang Twins, have recorded or performed with H.B.C.U. marching bands.
The success of the 2002 film “Drumline,” about a drummer in an innovative Southern marching band, probably helped propel show-style bands toward if not into the mainstream. It is thought around Prairie View that the band in the movie is based on the Marching Storm, although a few other top bands could make a similar claim.
In 1989 the Prairie View drumline introduced a new drums-only feature sequence, which usually includes a kind of circus gymnastics: throwing drums around, drummers carrying one another upside-down by the calves, walking and playing in pairs like a push-me-pull-you. And in 1994 the Box began rotating sections of its drumline during the routine, so that snare drummers weren’t always up in the front.
Amid the rampant trash-talking between supporters of different black college bands, Prairie View’s pioneering of this modern drumline feature seems to have become accepted history.
“If any other band tells you that they started that,” said Skip Wilson, an alumnus of the Box who now helps direct it, “I’ll eat a bug. And I’ll let you choose the bug.”
The Moves
The same day of the calamitous “Star-Spangled Banner,” the band played at an early-evening pep rally in the school gym. The campus and the land around it — the three-traffic-light town of Prairie View, the flat country between Houston and Austin — lay hot and quiet, but the gym was packed and raging. The Box played a cadence as the entire band filed in through the tunnel, “poppin’ 90s” (legs raised to 90-degree angles, as opposed to the heel-to-toe glide of corps-style marching), marching eight-to-five (eight long strides for every five yards). The house exploded at the band’s hype song:
P.V.U. is the place to be
Ain’t never gon’ stop
We’re the Marching Storm and we’re gon’ keep this here on lock
We’re the best at what we do
Keep playing, making all the moves
And anybody that wants some
We ready, we ready
They went into “Swamp,” a funk vamp. The cymbal players twirled their instruments around their heads, and then the band, freshmen and old-heads, tall, short, fat and thin, put down their instruments and danced, stretching their bodies into S shapes.
Funk keeps marching-band culture current. But most new radio hits are not very difficult to play, and Mr. Edwards regards them warily. He teaches marching band as a music department class, and his mandate both on and off the field is to teach musicianship.
“It really has gotten so bad, to where you have to go back and play old-school songs,” he said, “because that’s where your music is. If you play something hip and sound horrible,” he laughed, “who cares, man?”
So he pushes them through his arrangement of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” the fast-tempo jazz étude, which changes chords every other beat: murder on the sousaphones. And the band’s classics, too: the national anthem, the P.V.U. song (adapted from Sibelius’s “Finlandia”), old marches like “Purple Carnival.” Roaming the halls of the performing arts building, he growls theory quizzes at the music majors.
On Sept. 1, the morning of game day, the band looked wrung out.
The night before, the Marching Storm had battled Texas Southern University’s Ocean of Soul band at the Texas Souther gym. The event was cooked up as a money-raiser, and the bands split the proceeds. (The bands do not benefit from regular game revenues.) The show brought the Marching Storm about $9,000, pretty much the cost of the trip: six buses to Houston, a meal for 250.
Still, it was good public relations, and local hip-hop stations plugged the show heartily. This battle of the bands didn’t end with a winner — it was a double-sided pep rally, basically — but it excited the crowd. The band had gotten back to campus and into bed after midnight, ordered to report for early practice at 9. Now members were straggling on to the field, many late and hungry. The drill piece had problems: when the band formed the shape of the United States, some of the clarinets were drifting from Texas to California. Mr. Edwards levied fines, ordered pushups. By 11, eight hours before game time, the heat was oppressive. A mellophone player ran, panting, to fill his allotted space, somewhere around Los Angeles.
“I don’t think you’re ready,” Mr. Edwards said with practiced condescension, speaking to the band in a huddle. “But I’m not going to go through the show again.”
Halftime Arrives
After all that, halftime at the stadium felt almost anticlimactic.
Following the four drum majors’ introductory flourish, the band ran its drills perfectly through Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Can’t Let Go.” The Box improved on its routine. Both bands played Soulja Boy’s new “Crank That.”
But playing in the stands at intervals through the game, the Marching Storm gleamed. At one point its spooky version of Miles Davis’s “All Blues” — a blues hymn for 250 — was stepped on by the Ocean of Soul, which started up with some hip-hop before the peaceful song was done. Mr. Edwards went to have a word with the opposing band director.
Later the same thing happened, this time with a beautiful result. The Marching Storm started Rihanna’s summer hit “Umbrella,” and quickly, the Ocean of Soul responded in kind.
Neither side backed down. Out of sync, they both kept playing the same song, and the stadium rang with massed trumpet shouts imitating “Brella-ella-ella.” It was overwhelming, a wave of charisma. Footage of the “Umbrella” battle was online within hours. Providentially, Prairie View won the football game, 34-14.
