Marching in the footsteps of 97 years of band students preceding them, more than 250 members of the Purdue \u201cAll-American\u201d Marching Band will take center stage at the 100th Indianapolis 500 Mile Race on Sunday, May 29, when they play for the race\u2019s opening ceremonies.<\/p>\n
On Race Day, the Purdue \u201cAll-American\u201d Band will be the headliner in the traditional Parade of Bands that begins at 8:00 am at the track. Each year, Purdue invites bands across the United States to participate in the event, which is dominated by high school musicians. This year, 13 bands from across the state of Indiana, Washington, and Florida will be joining the Purdue Band. As it has done for many years, the band will play \u201cOn the Banks of the Wabash,\u201d as well as play entertaining music for the mass crowd prior to the start time.
\nIt was the marching band\u2019s first director, Paul Spotts Emrick, who forged the initial relationship with the Indianapolis 500 in 1919, the race\u2019s ninth year of existence. Always interested in promoting his band and Purdue, Emrick leapt at the chance to be associated with the young race that was quickly establishing an international reputation. At that time, the band was a military unit of men enrolled in Reserve Officer Training Corps at Purdue University.<\/p>\n
Purdue\u2019s band will again be featured in the IPL 500 Festival Parade at noon Saturday, May 28, which begins at North and Pennsylvania, and winds its way through downtown Indianapolis. The 500 Festival Parade was added to the race month activities in 1957 and the Purdue \u201cAll-American\u201d Marching Band has appeared in every parade since then.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Marching in the footsteps of 97 years of band students preceding them, more than 250 members of the Purdue \u201cAll-American\u201d Marching Band will take center stage at the 100th Indianapolis 500 Mile Race on Sunday, May 29, when they play<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[71,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archived","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/bands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/bands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/bands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/bands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/bands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4892"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/bands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15767,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/bands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4892\/revisions\/15767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/bands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/bands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purdue.edu\/bands\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}