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John Philip Sousa (November 6, 1854 – March 6, 1932), popularly known as "The March King", is probably the most famous conductor and composer in history of military marches.

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Sousa was born in Washington, D.C. to John António de Sousa and Maria Elisabeth Trinkhaus, parents of Portuguese and Bavarian (German) descent. When the young Sousa reached the age of 13, his father enlisted his son in the United States Marine Corps as an apprentice, shortly after he attempted to run away and join a circus.

Several years later, John left his apprenticeship to join a theatrical band. He learned to conduct, and returned to the U.S. Marine Band as its head in 1880. Sousa also led the marching band of Gonzaga College High School.

Sousa organized his own band in 1892. It toured widely, and in 1900, represented the United States at the Paris Exposition before touring Europe. Sousa repeatedly refused to conduct on the radio, fearing a lack of personal contact with the audience. He was finally persuaded to do so in 1929, and became a smash hit.

The marching brass bass, or sousaphone, is named after him.

Sousa's Foshay Tower March (1929) was created for the opening of the eponymous high-rise building in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Wilbur Foshay's energy-trading empire crumbled to dust in the beginning of the Great Depression and his check in payment for the march bounced, as retaliation, Sousa forbade the playing of the march as long as Foshay's debt remained outstanding. 70 years after the opening, and long after both men were dust, a group of Minneapolis investors paid off Foshay's debt, allowing the march to be played once again.

In addition to hundreds of marches, Sousa wrote ten operas and a number of musical suites.

Sousa exhibited many talents aside from music. He authored three novels and a full length autobiography as well as a great number of articles and letters-to-the-editor on a variety of subjects. As a trapshooter, he ranks as one of the all-time greats, and his skill as a horseman met championship criteria.

He was in the vanguard of the reactionary camp in the wars of his era (cf. Recording Industry Association of America), in which authors of sheet music railed against the upstart recording industry. In a submission to a congressional hearing in 1906, he argued that:,

dlThese talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy ... in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape. is the best known of the operettas. It has been in production somewhere in the world ever since it was written. have had revivals. The music of the operettas is light and cheerful. Many of the marches are derived from themes of the operettas.

One year after the 1882 Transit of Venus, Sousa was commissioned to compose a processional for the unveiling of a bronze statue of American physicist Prof. Joseph Henry, who had died in 1878. Henry, who had developed the first electric motor, was also the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

A Freemason, Sousa was fascinated by what the group considered mystical qualities in otherwise natural phenomena. According to Sten Odenwald of the NASA IMAGE Science Center[1], this played a significant role in the selection of the time and date of the performance, April 19, 1883, at 4:00 P.M. Dr. Odenwald points out that Venus and Mars, invisible to the participants, were setting in the west. At the same time, the Moon, Uranus and Virgo were rising in the east, Saturn had crossed the meridian, and Jupiter was directly overhead. According to Masonic lore, Venus was associated with the element copper, and Joseph Henry had used large quantities of copper to build his electric motors.

The "Transit of Venus March"[2] never caught on, and went unplayed for more than 100 years, after Sousa's copies of the music were destroyed in a flood. As reported in The Washington Post[3], Library of Congress employee Loras Schissel recently found copies of the old sheet music for "Venus" “languishing in the library's files.” The piece was resurrected recently, in time for the 2004 Transit.

— a 40,000-word prose story (written 1920) about a group of misogynists called the Alimony Club who, as a way of temporarily escaping the society of women, embark on a sea voyage to observe the transit of Venus. The captain's niece, however, has stown away on board and soon has won over the men. [4]

: in Copyright's Communication Policy by Professor Tim Woo, University of Virginia, May 2004 - Caution, 560k PDF.The Sousa Archives: A Center for American Music – Provides research-oriented management of band-related collections held for use by students, scholars, and performing musiciansThe Works of John Philip Sousa – Marches in MIDI format; from the website by David Lovrien, hosted by the Dallas Wind SymphonyJohn Philip Sousa and Sousa Band cylinder recordings, from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.