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Music|Dynamic Black Marching Bands Are Super Bowl Stalwarts
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/01/arts/music/super-bowl-hbcu-marching-band.html
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H.B.C.U. bands have been part of the festivities since the first halftime show. This year, Southern University’s “Human Jukebox” will perform before the national anthem.
Feb. 1, 2025
Long before Michael Jackson, the 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 indoor plumbing, but now he was staying in lavish accommodations with about 180 other members of the Grambling College marching band.
Soon they would high-step onto the field at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to perform in the halftime show of the very first Super Bowl.
“When we heard that crowd, it was like a spirit got into us, and we were walking on a cloud,” said Colston, 77, who played the cymbals. “Our step was higher, and the beat was faster.”
In the decades before the National Football League recruited stars to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show — the rapper Kendrick Lamar will headline on Feb. 9 at this year’s game in New Orleans — it frequently relied on dynamic marching bands from Grambling and other historically Black colleges and universities.
With nicknames like “Human Jukebox” (Southern University) and “Sonic Boom of the South” (Jackson State University), the musical groups are known for their creative formations and flamboyant showmanship. And the tradition has endured even as the Super Bowl has morphed into a corporate playground of advertisements, parties and spectacle.
At least 13 Super Bowl halftime shows have included H.B.C.U. marching bands, including Usher’s collaboration last year with Jackson State University, and they are often part of pregame festivities. (When Beyoncé performed at halftime of a Christmas Day regular-season game on Netflix, she incorporated Texas Southern University.)
