This unofficial university band consisted of just seven members, who were all males from multiple backgrounds, which included students, faculty, and Huntsville residents.
Early meetings of the band were focused on music instruction until Faifer felt they were ready for public performance.
Over the next twenty years the band was directed under four different men: Faifer through the spring of 1920; W. R. Ford (1920–21); Erwin G. Ernst (1922–28); N. J. Whitehurst (1928-37); and C. R. Hackney (1937–40).
They performed at all home basketball games; all pep rallies, assemblies, and a memorial ceremony for Sam Houston at the Huntsville Community Fair on Armistice Day.
In a program created by former Sam Houston alumni, the marching band performed in Fort Worth, Texas for a radio appearance.
The band made a return trip to Fort Worth the following semester to perform at the State Teachers Convention.
At the basketball games, according to the campus newspaper, The Houstonian, they "made the gym vibrate and helped put fight into the team and spirit into the student body".
Starting with the 1941 football season, the band began regular halftime shows and performed at eight of ten games.
The next year, Sam Houston's enrollment dwindled due to World War II to the point where there was no football team to perform for.
At war's end, the band slowly began to increase in numbers, reaching eighty-five members by the 1949 school year.
To replace the missing members, former Bearkat Marching Band alumni were asked to perform during the FCS Semifinal game.
In the early 1940s one popular halftime show was an American military tribute known as the "bomber formation", which included a blackout of the stadium, sirens, motors and fireworks to replicate a "bombing".
[9] Beginning with the 2011 football team's undefeated regular season, the Bearkat Marching Band plays DJ Khaled's hit song, All I Do Is Win after victories.
During the song, the fans, along with the football team, raise his or her right hand up over their head and curls the fingers down to form a paw.
Texas Governor Allen Shivers declared the band the official unit for the state on April 21 in the same year.