The bigger than life figure in the history of the American Band movement is clearly Dr. Air Force Band declared that “football has its Vince Lombardi, Symphony Orchestra has its Toscanini, the film industry its John Wayne. Don Canham, a legendary figure in his own right as athletic director from 1968 to 1988, once said: “I wouldn’t have dared tell Revelli what to do.” The commander-conductor of the U.S.

Other band directors said their students played better for Revelli, as a guest conductor, than for themselves.

Do you remember him? Share your story in our comments section. William Revelli built U-M’s band into the nation’s best. Revelli made the Marching Band the nation’s best by a combination of personal dedication (at the start of his career, at his own expense and on his own time, he devoted ten years of training and practice to mastering the principal band instruments) the highest standards (“Revelli was not fussy,” a drummer of the 1930s recalled much later, “we just had to be perfect”) and charisma. Revelli, director of U-M bands from 1935 to 1971. The assignment testified to the extraordinary prestige of the band and especially of its director, William D. In the fall of 1950 Eisenstaedt was in Ann Arbor on assignment from Life, then monumentally popular, to shoot a feature package on the Michigan Marching Band. The photo was taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt (1898-1995), the great Time-Life photographer who specialized in capturing spontaneous images that told an entire story, the best-known example being a sailor’s passionate embrace of a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day in 1945. In the background, four stately trees seem to march in a procession of their own. Seven children bounce along behind him in ragged single-file, their own heads thrown back in imitation. It shows an exuberant drum major-head thrust back, right leg thrust forward at an impossible angle-marching from right to left across a close-cut field. On October 30, 1950, Life magazine carried what is arguably the most widely seen and possibly the best photograph ever made at the University of Michigan.

Alfred eisenstaedt bill clinton