TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Dr. William P. Foster, credited with innovating a much-imitated high-stepping style as founder and longtime director of the Florida A&M Marching 100 band, died Saturday. He was 91.
Foster died in Tallahassee, university officials said. They did not release a cause of death.
Foster served as the marching band’s director from 1946 until his retirement in 1998. He created more than 200 half-time pageants for the band at the historically Black university.
He is credited with innovating marching band techniques, including a high-stepping style imitated by high school and college bands nationwide.
A 1991 article in USA Today called the Marching 100 “probably the best known college marching band in the USA,” and a 1989 New York Times piece called them “perhaps the most imitated of marching bands.”
“There’s a psychology to running a band,” Foster told The New York Times in 1989. “People want to hear the songs they hear on the radio; it gives them an immediate relationship with you. And then there’s the energy. Lots of energy in playing and marching. Dazzle them with it. Energy.”
In 1989, the French chose the Marching 100 to represent the United States in the Bastille Day Parade in Paris, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. Instead of traditional marching band music, the band marched—and danced—to songs by James Brown.
