In 2009 the enthusiastic television commentator for Huntsville's station WHNT laid on the hyperbole as uniformed college students marched past the cameras on a cloudy autumn Saturday:

Although the more than 200 student musicians of the modern “Marching Maroon & White” band who strutted and played through the streets of Huntsville on that chilly and damp fall day may indeed have earned a place of regional if not national distinction, the band's history traces back to a time of truly modest beginnings. Ten years after the end of the American Civil War, the Huntsville State Normal School, an “Institution for the Education of Colored teachers,” opened its doors and admitted its first class of students. Five years later, this school boasted a band in addition to a thriving vocal music program. At the head of the infant music curriculum stood a talented music teacher, William Grant Still, Sr., father of the now famous 20th-century composer and conductor, William Grant Still, Jr. The senior Still was in charge of both the choir and the band, and in 1891 the school newspaper reported that:

The founder of the institution, Principal William Hooper Councill, had both a personal love of music and a humanistic regard for the importance of music in general education. Aware of the artistic and financial successes of the Fisk Jubilee Singers as they toured through several northern states in the 1870s, this hard-working and practical man, a former slave, was also mindful that music might offer him an opportunity to carry the message of his school and of African-American culture and excellence to the general population of the southern states.