John Philip Sousa was already known as “The March King” when he brought his band to the Academy of Music on May 14, 1897.
What he unveiled that evening in Philadelphia, etching his epithet even deeper into musical lore, was a patriotic piece he credited to divine inspiration. This was “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” which we celebrate today not only as Sousa’s most iconic piece but also as the National March of the United States of America. It’s sure to be a cornerstone of semiquincentennial observations both ceremonial and casual — including WRTI’s Sousalarm feature, this Friday at 7:15 a.m.
From its opening fanfare to its final flourish, the march brims with earnest purpose. “It is of a martial nature throughout,” reported the Philadelphia Public Ledger the day after the Academy of Music premiere, “and stirring enough to rouse the American eagle from his crag and set him to shriek exultantly while he hurls his arrows at the aurora borealis.”
J. Raymond Parke, an editor at The Philadelphia Evening Item, provided more detail (if a bit less color) in his overnight review. “It was excellent,” he wrote. “It created a furor. None of us were satisfied until the band, good naturedly enough, had played it three times over. I predict its popularity.”
Few predictions have ever landed more on the mark. But while “The Stars and Stripes Forever” now stands as an American hallmark as fondly familiar as the Betsy Ross flag itself, this march has a history and legacy that might surprise even many devoted Sousaphiles. Delving into that back story only deepens its resonance, at a moment when every part of the American project is worth contemplating.
Service and honor were core principles for John Philip Sousa.
He was born in Washington, D.C. on November 6, 1854. His father — João António de Sousa, born in Spain of Portuguese ancestry — played trombone in the United States Marine Band. Sousa followed in those footsteps, apprenticing with the Marine Band from age 13 on. Following his discharge at 21, he pursued a career in theater music, touring with several companies. Then he moved to Philadelphia, where he found work as a composer, arranger, and proofreader for music publishing houses.
In 1880, after scoring some arrangements of operatic fare for the Marine Band, he was invited to rejoin the Corps as the ensemble’s 17th director. He moved back to the nation’s capital and began a legendary tenure, bolstering the band’s reputation for excellence and composing new material — like “Semper Fidelis,” which the Marine Corps adopted as its theme, and “The Washington Post,” which inspired his nickname (conferred by an admiring journalist in Britain).
Under Sousa’s baton, the Marine Band made its earliest recordings — 60 wax cylinders for the Columbia Phonograph Company, beginning in 1890. The following year, the band embarked on its first-ever tour, a five-week affair that reached more than 30 cities in the northeast and midwest. Behind this operation was an artist manager named David Blakely, who organized an even more ambitious cross-country tour the following year. Based on its success, Blakely persuaded Sousa to form a civilian band, and the two began a lucrative partnership. On July 30, 1892, the March King resigned from the Marine Band — which he had led under five Presidents — to form his own Sousa Band, which quickly found great success.
Four years later, Sousa was vacationing in Europe when Blakely died in his office in the Carnegie Building (suddenly, “from an attack of apoplexy,” reported the New York Times). As soon as Sousa received this news, he cut his trip short. “I was extremely lonely and anxious to return,” he later recalled, in a letter to the District of Columbia Society. “I sailed from Liverpool on the White Star Line The Teutonic, and during the voyage the melodies of ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’ came to me, as I paced the deck with a mental brass band playing the march fully a hundred times during the week I was on the steamer.” The date on his manuscript for this march is December 25, 1896 — Christmas Day.
“The Stars and Stripes Forever” deploys a number of musical devices typical of a Sousa march. “Its form might be summarized as: intro A A B B C D C’ D C’’,” writes music historian Esther M. Morgan-Ellis. “It begins with a brief but loud introduction by the whole band. This is followed by three distinctive melodic passages, or ‘strains,’ the first two of which (A and B) are repeated. Each of the strains is in the major mode, and each — naturally — features the regular pulse of percussion and low brass. Next, an interlude (D) interrupts the pleasant mood of the strains: Blasting brass belt out chromatic scales and dissonant chords, exploring minor-mode territory while climbing to successively higher pitch levels. It is a relief, therefore, when the third strain returns (C’), now with a piccolo countermelody floating over the topic. Another interlude (D) sets up a final rendition of the C strain. Now elaborated upon even further, C’’ features both the piccolo countermelody and an additional countermelody in the trombones.”
Sousa himself explained that the three themes of the final trio were meant to evoke the three regions of the United States. The main theme represents the North, while the jaunty piccolo obbligato represents the South. A trombone countermelody speaks for the West. The harmonious union of these contrasting strains would seem to present a hopeful metaphor, no less today than in the decades following the Civil War.
But Sousa wasn’t content to speak only in metaphor. He later wrote lyrics to his march, including these for the main theme:
Hurrah for the flag of the free!
May it wave as our standard forever,
The gem of the land and the sea,
The banner of the right.
Let despots remember the day
When our fathers with mighty endeavor
Proclaimed as they marched to the fray
That by their might and by their right it waves forever.
Beginning in the 1930s, parody lyrics to Sousa’s march gained popularity on college campuses. This jokey version of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” was known colloquially as “The Duck Song,” though its proper title — if the word “proper” can be said to apply — came from the first line in the chorus. In the early ‘60s, Sing Along with Mitch, the CBS prime-time hit, used the song as a sign-off; the show’s host, oboist and Columbia A&R executive Mitch Miller, also recorded it, as “Be Kind to Your Web-Footed Friends.”
A march can carry multiple meanings, depending on the crowd and the circumstances.
This is especially true of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” as Stephen J. Spignesi and others have observed. “In a parade, the song stands for America, patriotism, and Old Glory,” he writes. “In the circus world, the song is a signal that there is something terribly wrong, and it is only played when disaster has struck or is imminent.” In his 2004 book Catastrophe! The 100 Greatest Disasters of All Time, Spignesi details one such tragedy on July 6, 1944, at a Ringling Bros. Circus in Hartford, Connecticut. The Flying Wallendas, a family daredevil act, were traversing a high wire on bicycles when they spotted flames racing up a wall of the big top.
“Bandleader Merle Evans quickly ordered the band to start the Sousa march (nicknamed the ‘disaster march’ by circus folk),” writes Spignesi, “and circus workers throughout the tent and backstage immediately stopped what they were doing and raced for the exits.” There were between 7,000 and 8,000 people in the tent for this matinee, and while most made it out, nearly 170 died, most of them children, and several hundred more sustained serious injuries. It was the worst circus tragedy in the United States.
That “The Stars and Stripes Forever” would be playing during such a dire and chaotic moment is a strange outcome, to be sure. But the sheer ubiquity and durability of Sousa’s march almost ensures this sort of multiplicity. Sales of the sheet music alone netted Sousa more than $400,000 in his lifetime, and recordings and broadcasts continued to generate income for years to come. New arrangements have proliferated, including an orchestral transcription by Leopold Stokowski, which he recorded with The Philadelphia Orchestra in 1929.
Sousa cherished his most famous composition to the end of his life, though he also struggled in vain to produce another piece of comparable impact. “The Stars and Stripes Forever” was featured in every Sousa Band appearance, typically both near the top of a concert and as an encore. Members of the Sousa Band later attested that they couldn’t recall an occasion where the piece wasn’t played.
The same held true of Sousa’s freelance alignments. He conducted a rehearsal of "The Stars and Stripes Forever" as a guest conductor with the Ringgold Band — one of America’s first community bands — on March 5, 1932. The following day, Sousa died of heart failure in his room at the Abraham Lincoln Hotel in Reading, Pennsylvania. He was 77.
His New York Times obituary noted the details of his death, adding that on his 77th birthday, “Mr. Sousa stood before the WJZ microphone, led a large band in ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever’ on a nation-wide network, cut a birthday cake given by five noted conductors and told the radio audience he wanted to live to be 100 so that he could write many more marches.” That wish may not have come to pass, but the enduring strains of his best-loved march have kept the flag waving, through every hopeful or harrowing change in this nation’s history.
