Florida A&M marching band guru William Foster dies at 91

LOS ANGELES — At the University of Kansas in the late 1930s, William P. Foster was barred from joining the marching band because he was black.

When he graduated in 1941, he aspired to direct a band but the school's dean of music told him "there were no jobs for colored conductors," Foster told Florida's Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 1998.

He took those discouraging words as a challenge to create his own band, he later said.

In 1946 he founded the Florida A&M Marching 100 band, and over the next 50 years turned it into one of the best college bands in the nation as he popularized high-step marching and swinging showmanship.

Foster died Saturday of pneumonia at a Tallahassee, Fla., hospital, said a university spokeswoman. He was 91.

He helped revolutionize marching-band style by introducing the sounds and dance moves of black popular culture into halftime shows at the historically black university.

The band's style became internationally famous under his leadership.

By the 1970s many of the dominant bands in the country incorporated Foster's techniques, according to a 2003 San Jose Mercury News interview with Darryl Lassiter, who made the film "Pay the Price" about a marching band at a fictional black college.

Foster combined precise marching formations with snazzy dance steps, singing and strutting.

In 1989 the band was chosen by France to be the sole U.S. representative in a Paris parade celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution. They marched and danced to James Brown tunes.

William Patrick Foster was born Aug. 25, 1919, in Kansas City, Kan., to a railway clerk and his wife.

He took up the clarinet at 12 and in high school was student director of the band. When he was 17, he directed an all-city band in Kansas City.

Foster's wife of 68 years, Mary Ann, died in 2007. He is survived by two sons, William and Anthony, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.