John Philip Sousa  

1854-1932 

    “Anybody can write music of a sort. But touching the public heart is quite another thing. “ 

                                                                -John Philip Sousa 

        You can’t escape it.  If you grow up in Americayou know the music of John Philip Sousa – even if you’ve never heard the name in your life.   

        You hear it at sports events, parades, and in television and radio ads, especially around the Fourth of July.  Band concerts frequently begin or end with a Sousa march.  And have you ever had “Be Kind to Your Fine Feathered Friends” stuck in your head?  (Admit it!)  Did you know that the original tune is the theme to the trio section of Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever – a song so popular that Americans petitioned to make it the country’s national march in 1987? 

        Sousa wrote so many of America’s greatest march tunes that he is known as the March King.  And it’s no wonder.  He literally grew up in the band, playing marches. 

        Sousa’s father, Antonio, played trombone in the U.S. Marine Corps Band.  By the time the boy was six, he enrolled his son in a music conservatory where the boy studied theory and composition and learned to play the violin. 

        At 13, young John Philip had big plans.  Like many children of the time, he dreamed of running away to join the circus (he wanted to become the bandleader!)  He almost succeeded.  Fortunately for him, his father found out – and enrolled him in the Marine Corps! (As an apprentice in the Marine Corps Band, that is, where he could keep an eye on him!) 

        Sousa stayed in the Marine Band for seven years as an apprentice, left at the age of twenty to pursue his career as a musician, and returned six year later to reenlist as the 17^th director – and the first American-born leader - of the United States Marine Band. 

        The rest, of course, is history.  When Sousa first took up the Marine Band baton, the band simply did not meet his standards.  He got busy and recruited some of the best musicians he knew, and trained the band to perform with (of course) military precision.  He also wrote six new marches (the first of many) to supplement the band’s tired repertoire.   

        It wasn’t long before the Marine Band gained the reputation of being a top-notch performing group.  This was back before recorded music.  Live bands were the major popular entertainment of the day.  And Sousa’s band became more popular than Elvis.  One march in particular, the Washington Post, was a smash hit.  It was played so often as music for the wildly popular new dance step, the two-step, that many a dancer, when requesting any music for the two-step, would simply yell “Give us a Washington Post!” 

        Sousa was as talented at public relations as he was at music.  He was in touch with what the public wanted and gave it to them, both while leading the Marine Band and for forty years afterwards, touring with his own band, the Sousa Band.  But he remained a top-notch musician to the core and used his popularity to educate people, too.  He introduced his audiences to the great composers through his band transcriptions of their music.   

        Sousa was an influential figure in other areas, too.   He loved the sport of trapshooting, and helped form what has become the Amateur Trapshooting Association, serving as its first president.  He was a writer, producing five novels’ a multitude of articles and editorials, and an autobiography entitled Marching Along (which received a favorable review in the August 16^th 2008 (!) issue of The Wall Street Journal.   He agitated for copyright law reform and was influential in winning royalty rights for composers.  And (drum roll, please!) he pushed for the development of school bands and orchestras.    

Sadly, the popularity of his genre has kept Sousa from being rightfully recognized as the influential composer he is - at least, by those who seem to think they know.  Sousa is notably absent from this writer’s copy of Grout’s A History of Western Music.  This despite the fact that Sousa transformed band music with his creative approach to march form, and that he wrote many and various pieces of “serious” as well as popular music. 

Above all, though, John Philip Sousa strove to raise popular music to a higher level.  “To the average mind popular music would mean compositions vulgarly conceived and commonplace in their treatment,” he wrote.  “That is absolutely false.”   

Perhaps, given the fact that almost nobody would voluntarily read Grout for fun, we can award Sousa the last laugh!