Merle says, “I came up the hard way. I was never able to study at famous conservatories or under famous teachers. But I believed that if you work hard, treat people right and keep looking up to better things all the time, your time will come.”
And Merle’s opportunity did come at the age of fifteen when he was asked to sign up with the “Mighty Brundage Shows,” a traveling carnival. His parents and sisters tearfully bade him goodby. His mother was worried about the bad company he would keep, but his letters soon assured her that in the circus there must be a strict schedule of rehearsal, right living and sound training. Merle had little leisure time as his job included playing in the band, helping to set up the props and working the carousel.
Merle next signed up with a band on a show boat on the Mississippi River. In the towns where they gave shows, the band led the parades. He not only learned much from this larger band, but he had time to practice five hours a day.
A succession of jobs followed. While working for a touring medicine show, Merle played his cornet to attract the crowd then turned to packing pills into bottles to sell to them. From this work he went to the National Stock Company which opened up in Baton Rouge. He says, “I not only led the band, but I also took the tickets and worked the pulleys for the ‘Saw Mill.’ This act was the climax of the show, a thriller act where a young girl narrowly escaped being sawed in two.”
In 1918 Merle went out with Gus Hill’s Minstrel Band of twenty-eight musicians. This was a busy life of long parades and long programs. About this time he realized that he should be looking for a better job. He had heard the great Sousa several times and he yearned to have a band like his.
Things began looking up for Merle when Ranch 101 hired him to play for its huge Wild West show whose main attraction was Buffalo Bill. Merle recalls, “Buffalo Bill used to stop to talk to me about my music and encourage me to keep on with it.” Soon at the age of nineteen Merle was asked to lead the band for the combined Ringling Brothers-Barnum and Bailey Circus.
Since that time Maestro Evans has truly been the pulse of “The Greatest Show on Earth.” He and his all-brass array play more than 225 different cues during each show. The music ranges from Big Time Boogie to selections by Wagner and Tchaikovsky. The typical galops and marches that they play were composed mostly by men whose ears were tuned to the sounds and atmosphere of the kingdom of spangles.
But special music has been written for the Merle Evans Band by the distinguished composers, Deems Taylor and Igor Stravinsky. The musical scores, Circus Suite and Through the Looking Glass, Deems Taylor wrote for the 1945 plot of Alice in Wonderland. Stravinsky’s music was arranged for the first elephant ballet ever to be staged. Fifty elephants in fetching ballet skirts performed a dance routine whose music called for elaborate changes of rhythm.
For a number of years Evans himself composed most of the original music and made the musical arrangements for the star acts—waltzes, foxtrots, marches, galops, rhumbas, tangoes, cakewalks, or various combinations of rhythms. He did this while the circus was in winter quarters at Sarasota, Florida, where the next years’ productions are prepared. “Music has changed a lot since I joined the big show,” Merle said recently. “Now we have much of it arranged for our band. We also have production numbers—and that is special music.”
Aerialists have said that it is rhythm that makes it possible for them to accomplish the seemingly impossible in their flying trapeze acts. Sometimes Evans spends much time and effort finding the appropriate music for them. When Alberty, the “upside-down daredevil,” needed music to accompany his swaying back and forth atop a forty-five-foot pole, Evans finally chose Pagan Love Song, a slow waltz.