The United States Marine Band has made available for free MP3 download all the Sousa marches from their "Semper Fidelis" CD!  Go there now and download this excellent collection free of charge!

Try your skill at shooting down the band instruments raining down in the sky with your trusty Sousaphone, firing musical notes at them to bring them down!  With a tasty soundtrack of Sousa tunes, this is a fun game!  <Play Sousapalooza>

Yankee Stadium, Opening Day 1923

An era will be coming to an end this weekend with the final game at Yankee Stadium. There is been much reminiscing over this past season about the storied history of "The House that Ruth Built". An interesting bit of trivia: John Philip Sousa conducted the Seventh Regiment Band at the stadium's opening ceremony on April 18th, 1923. No doubt one of the pieces performed was The Gallant Seventh, completed by Sousa in 1922 for that same band.

Listen:

Nice article by Terry Teachout for the Wall Street Journal:

Everybody knows that John Philip Sousa wrote "Stars and Stripes Forever." OK, not everybody -- nowadays there are plenty of cultural illiterates who don't even know that Beethoven wrote the Fifth -- but most Americans still connect Sousa's name with the best-known and best-loved of all marches, and a fair number of us can sing the nonsense lyrics that some anonymous wag set to the tune of the trio section: "Be kind to your web-footed friends/For a duck may be somebody's mother." For that matter, just about everybody who played in a high-school marching band knows that Sousa was nicknamed the March King and that he also wrote "Semper Fidelis," "The Washington Post" and a whole lot of other marches (133, to be exact) whose strutting, vibrant vigor remains unrivaled to this day...

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