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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