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.
"Dr. Foster had an indelible impact on college marching bands," Frank Wickes, the longtime director of Louisiana State University's marching band, told the Los Angeles Times in e-mail. "He pioneered the high-energy style which was emulated by the majority of African-American university marching bandsnationwide."
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.
"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. ... Dazzle them with it."
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