Sousa believed that he was inspired to write marches by the influence of the Civil War days during his childhood in Washington. At that time the air was filled with the sound of marching troops and military bands, and this impression had never left him. Sousa is said to have been responsible for the great popularity of marches during the 1890 decade.
The Stars and Stripes Forever came to him during an ocean voyage. Called home by the death of his friend and manager, David Blakesly, he sailed from Naples. He spent hours pacing back and forth on deck, and this music came into his mind and would not leave. When he arrived home, he immediately wrote the composition as he had heard it. This march was published without any change at all, and from its various sources earned Sousa over $300,000.
In World War I Sousa gave up his band and his huge salary to join the Great Lakes Naval Reserve. He became conductor of the Great Lakes Band for which he accepted only one dollar a month. He at once shaved off his luxurious beard—“so the young fellows wouldn’t think me so much older than they.”
The number of enlistments fairly swamped the band quarters. Hundreds flocked to receive instruction from this noted bandmaster. There were so many that Sousa organized a band battalion of 350 with a full quota of officers. The remaining men he put into double battleship units which were assigned to each regiment at the station and to different ships as the Admirals requested. While he was with the Great Lakes Band, Sousa designed a new band instrument—a mellow-toned horn to replace the Helicon tuba with its harsh sound. This Sousaphone is in use in all large bands today.
At the end of the war Sousa reassembled his concert band of eighty-four top-notch players. This was generally acknowledged the finest concert band of all time. He traveled with the group through six months of the year and vacationed the remaining months. For some time Sousa refused to broadcast as he disliked the radio. He said that he missed the direct contact with his audience and the stimulation of its presence and applause. However, when he was seventy-five years old, he accepted the large salary offered him to play weekly broadcasts of one hour each.
Although the world at large knew Sousa as the March King, his more than one hundred marches represent only a small part of his writings. He also composed ten operas, including El Capitan, in which De Wolfe Hopper starred. The Queen of Hearts, The Bride Elect, Chris and the Wonderful Lamp, and The Charlatan, all big successes in their day. He composed more than twenty suites, forty or fifty songs, and a monumental work for orchestra, organ and choir, including The Last Crusade. He wrote three novels: Pipetown Sandy, in which he devoted a chapter describing the two-day march of the victorious U. S. Northern army; The Transit of Venus; and The Fifth String. He was the author of numerous magazine articles, and an illustrated biographical sketch ran serially in the Saturday Evening Post in 1925. His autobiography, Marching Along, was published in 1928.
So many sources of income brought Sousa great wealth. He had always liked to ride horseback, play golf, and shoot clay pigeons at the trap. To indulge in these hobbies he bought a large farm—700 acres—in North Carolina. There he also raised game birds—quail, grouse and partridges, as well as dogs and horses. But Sousa really spent most of his free time at his beautiful home at Sands Point on Long Island, New York. There he was happiest when surrounded by his devoted wife and family. There he often entertained his warm friends, among whom were Thomas A. Edison, Victor Herbert, Irving Berlin and Charles Chaplin.
Sousa was seventy-eight years old when he died of a sudden heart attack, March 6, 1932, at Reading, Pennsylvania. He had gone there to lead the Ringgold band on its eightieth anniversary. His body was brought home to Washington, his birthplace, and lay in state in the bandroom of the Marine Barracks, where at the age of thirteen his musical career had begun.
During his funeral the Senators and Representatives of the U. S. Government paused in their proceedings to pay a tribute to John Philip Sousa, whom they called “The world’s greatest composer of march music.”
Sousa is buried in the Congressional Cemetery on a grassy plot, not far from his beloved Capitol.