Music: Der Vashington Pust

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At the Bamboo Gardens they swung it.

At the Shoreham Hotel they waltzed it. The U. S. Marine Band, in Potomac Park, played it straight: Dee deedle dee dum dum, dum dum, dum dum. . . . Dee deedle dee dum dee dum dee dum. . . . Many another orchestra and soloist twanged and blared it. It was even played in Hawaiian style. A local radio station dramatized the life of its author. All this hullabaloo in Washington, D. C. celebrated a work which first took U. S. ears by storm 50 years ago: John Philip Sousa's The Washington Post March.

Most people might suppose that the march was dedicated to an army post, or the Post Office department, or perhaps had something to do with a post horn. Actually, it was a theme song (before the days of theme songs), commissioned in 1889 by a newspaper, the twelve-year-old Washington Post.* Washington-born John Sousa, 34, son of a longtime member of the Marine Band, had become its leader. The heavy-bearded bandmaster dashed off the march, had the Band play it on the Smithsonian Institution grounds, where 25,000 people gathered for the presentation of prizes in a children's essay contest sponsored by the Post's Amateur Authors Association.

The Washington Post March, in two-step time, was taken up by U. S. dancing masters and swept the world. When Sousa's own band played in Germany, his audiences clamored for "Der Vashington Pust." The piece was played, as a "typical American" work, at the dedication of a German monument to Richard Wagner. European composers wrote pieces with titles like Vorwärts—A Washington Post, as if this were a special dance like the waltz or polka. An army officer told Sousa that in a Borneo jungle he met a boy with a violin, sawing out the familiar deedle-dee-dums of the march. How many millions of copies the Washington Post sold, John Philip Sousa never knew. Like many composers with a good tune, he sold his rights to it early, to a Philadelphia publisher, for $35.