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.
Lamar has not said if he will feature an H.B.C.U. band in his nearly 15-minute performance while the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles are recuperating. But there will be a presence at the Caesars Superdome when Southern University, from Baton Rouge, La., plays before Jon Batiste sings the national anthem.
Each H.B.C.U. marching band has its own style and look, with vibrant uniforms that often match the school colors. But no matter the school, spectators have come to expect a rollicking show with high-stepping choreography, dancers often at the front, and trumpeters and drummers swaying in rhythm while blowing or pounding their instruments.
“That particular style of performance has always had broad appeal, and marching bands and other musical groups have always been cultural ambassadors for Black colleges,” said Steven Lewis, the curator of music and performing arts for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
Grambling’s band of all-Black students was invited to Los Angeles at the height of the civil rights movement, and to a city still reeling from the flames and mayhem of the Watts riots two years earlier. Some Black leaders implored university administrators to reject the invitation.
“There was a feeling early on that it was an empty gesture,” Lewis said of the invitation to Grambling, which is now known as Grambling State University. “But that criticism has been going on for quite a long time, and it’s something the league still has to work on.”
After the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick repeatedly knelt during the national anthem in 2016 to protest racial injustice, and a rancorous debate about patriotism and civil rights ensued, some Black stars were hesitant to perform at the Super Bowl. In 2019, the N.F.L. began a partnership with Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s entertainment and sports company, that led to recent performances by the Weeknd, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and other prominent Black artists.
Marching bands carry outsize influence and pride at H.B.C.U.s, many of which were founded shortly after the Civil War and incorporated military marching in their curriculums.
The bands are student-recruitment tools, garnering attention at the Rose Parade and presidential inaugurations, including Mississippi Valley State University’s performance at President Trump’s last month. Some groups compete against one another at events such as the Battle of the Bands, giving energetic flair to contemporary songs.
They also caught the attention of football executives looking to infuse entertainment in a new event. When the champions of the National Football League and the American Football League met for the first time, the Super Bowl was not yet called the Super Bowl.
“You looked at those bands, and it was the fact that they were more than just a marching band,” said Jim Steeg, the N.F.L.’s former vice president of special events, who oversaw the Super Bowl for more than two decades beginning in the mid-1970s. “They were just performing different than everybody else.”
After Grambling’s longtime president, Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones, decided that its band would play in the first Super Bowl halftime show, the musicians practiced through the university’s holiday break. In the 1960s, Colston said, 5 a.m. practices were not uncommon.
“They said, ‘We don’t turn down no performances,’” Colston said. “‘We’re going to go anywhere.’”
One day, Colston said, Jones gave a wad of cash to a drummer with instructions to dole out $2 to each band member for a spending allowance in Los Angeles.
When the musicians flowed onto the football field at halftime, Grambling joined the marching band from the University of Arizona, a mostly white school, to depict a map of the United States. The bands played “This Is My Country” for the finale as a sea of balloons ascended.
“We had to conduct ourselves in a professional way because this was a group of colored kids in a white society,” Colston said. “We were representing our schools, our churches, the towns we came from.”
H.B.C.U. bands were included in the following three Super Bowl halftimes. After the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the director of the Florida A&M band created a set themed around American pride for Super Bowl III in Miami the following year.
George Quillet, a clarinetist for Florida A&M, said many of his bandmates initially disagreed with the concept for the performance but later changed their minds.
“We really got invigorated because our leaders guided us through the process of what we had to do,” said Quillet, now 76.
The show included them marching into a formation shaped like a flying eagle. After marching into letters resembling “U.S.A.,” the students stood still as a speaker blared portions of President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
This Super Bowl is the 11th to be held in New Orleans: Southern University took on a Mardi Gras theme at halftime of the city’s first Super Bowl, in 1970, and Grambling performed a tribute to Duke Ellington in 1975. Three years later, Southern played a 12-minute pregame routine.
Kenny Ricard, a Southern clarinetist who is now 67, said that before taking the field in 1978, the band’s members recited the chant they uttered ahead of every performance: “Pick up your feet, drive and blow, start thinking about the show.”
In those decades, marching bands were eager and dependable entertainment options for the N.F.L., which was concerned with the logistics of creating a show that could entertain both an in-person and television audience.
The starry gates swung open in 1993, when Michael Jackson stood motionless onstage for nearly a minute of raucous applause before singing a medley of his beloved hits with the pageantry of pyrotechnics. Steeg said the N.F.L. needed to bolster the halftime show to keep fans engaged and away from counterprogramming on other networks.
As A-listers took center stage — the past two Super Bowls in New Orleans were headlined by U2 and Beyoncé — H.B.C.U. bands began taking a more complementary role. In 2007, Florida A&M supported Prince’s performance, supplying background music from below an elevated platform.
Shelby Chipman, who was then on the band’s staff and is now its director, said Prince’s agent had called the band, asking it to play. His team sent musical information so the band could match the notes he would sing but otherwise gave it creative liberty for its dance routines and formations.
Prince’s team visited Florida A&M a few weeks before the Super Bowl to see a rehearsal. The band practiced with Prince only once, less than 24 hours before the game.
“Normally with these kinds of performances, they give us the green light,” Chipman said.
Colston, who has worked in customer service for the N.F.L.’s Washington Commanders, still attends homecomings at Grambling State and relives memories of the first Super Bowl. He hopes that the celebrities who now dominate the stage know their history.
“We opened the door for them,” he said.
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