John Phillip Sousa is best known for composing marches and if you've ever heard a marching band, or seen practically any film ever set in an American high school or watched the opening credits of Monty Python's Flying Circus then you've heard a Sousa march.
(You might think if you've watched Bridge on the River Kwai then you've heard a Sousa march, but the march you are thinking of, which is called the Colonel Bogey March (or occasionally, 'that one about Hitler's balls') isn't actually one of his. That was written by a different King of Marches, Kenneth J. Alford (real name Kenneth J. Rickets; it doesn't take a genius to work out why he changed it). Since we're talking about the Colonel Bogey March I may as well mention it's the only march I know of which was a) composed during a golf game and b) named after an imaginary person.
But both of those things are by the by, because Sousa looks like this
which is exactly what I expected to him to look like. The moustache, particularly.
His father sent him off to the marines at thirteen to stop him from joining the circus, then he left the marines and joined the pit orchestra at a theatre (definitely the most fun kind of orchestra to play in), where he learned to conduct, and then he went back to the Marines to lead their band.
After that he started his own marching band which ran for forty years and marched in a total of eight parades. One of the parades was in Paris and the band also toured Australia. (This was a much better story until I realised that, while reading about the band I missed the line about them playing 15,632 sitting down concerts also. For a while I genuinely thought they'd performed once every five years, and managed to turn two of those performances into overseas jollies.)
He wrote a ton of marches (what's a better collective noun - a stampede maybe?) and also a bunch of operettas, most of which had propera opera sounding names like El Capitan or The Smugglers, and one which was called Chris and the Wonderful Lamp, which sounds more like a children's story. Also several novels, and a memoir called (rather pleasingly) Marching Along.
He was around when commercial sound recording was starting to develop, and wasn't a fan of the newfangled technology. "These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country" he said, and I suppose there are a few people around today who'd agree with him about the state of the recording industry. Fewer, I imagine, who'd agree with his prediciton that recorded music would lead to the eventual elimination of vocal chords via the process of evolution. Although maybe that's all part of Simon Cowell's grand plan.
He was also a keen trap-shooter. A line from his Trapshooting Hall of Fame biography:
"Let me say that just about the sweetest music to me is when I call, ‘pull,’ the old gun barks, and the referee in perfect key announces, ‘dead’."This clip is The Liberty Bell, one of his most well-known marches, but performed in a way you've probably not heard it played before: on an accoustic guitar. It's Sunday night, after all. Let's not go too crazy.
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