And There I Stood with My Piccolo

4

DID YOU EVER HEAR OF SAM OTTS? There's no such fellow, you know, yet there are thousands of people who firmly believe the legend that an immigrant boy of that name came to this country some eighty years ago, and that stamped on his trunk, according to legend, were his initials —S. O.—for Sam Otts, followed by the letters U. S. A.—his destination. S-O-U-S-A. That could have been the way Sousa got his name, but it wasn't. John Philip Sousa's namewas Sousa, not Sam Otts, and the first time he ever saw the old country was when he was invited there by practically every crowned head in Europe. Pretty good for a barefoot kid from Washington, B.C. After I joined the band I used to sit on the train every day with a pocket score of the "Nutcracker Suite" just to make an impression on anyone who happened to walk down the aisle. Actually I had no idea how to read a score. 4. 34 Mr. Sousa suspected this, I'm sure, as I used to stay on one page entirely too long, but instead of asking me embarrassing questions he slid into my seat one day and started giving me little hints about orchestrating and how he got so he could read a score and all. Believe me, he got so he could write a score too, the most gorgeous marches in the whole world, that's all. No silly little tune with an umpaumpa accompaniment in any of Sousa's marches. Every part of a Sousa march is inspired—the bass line, the woodwindfigures,the trombone countermelodies , and even the peckhorn afterbeats. Listen to these: "The New York Hippodrome," "Manhattan Beach," "El Capitan," "The Free Lance," "Powhatan's Daughter," "The Gallant Seventh," "King Cotton," "High School Cadets," "Washington Post," and seventy or eighty more. Why, he couldn't write a bad march if he tried, and there sure ought to be a law against playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever" as a razzle-dazzle comedy play-off the way you used to hear it in vaudeville , and the way you still hear it occasionally on the radio. Anyway, what I wanted to say was, I trouped for three seasons with Sousa from Portland to Portland and from Ottawa to Havana—real twoa -day trouping. If it's possible to play a matinee in Butte and a night in Cheyenne, we did it. 35 Sousa was a great musician—composed every note of everything he ever put his name on. That seems a horribly obvious remark to make, but lots of people have some cockeyed idea that he paid somebody to help him. Sousa was a good novelist, too, and a mighty fine trapshooter. We played a matinee on the veranda of the Lancaster Gun Club one time because Mr. Sousa wanted to attend the shoot the following day. The management got the dates mixed, however, and I was right in the middle of my flute solo when somebody yelled, "Pull!" and the celebrated "Godard Waltz" developed into a duet for flute and shotgun. The Sousa band carried six flute players as standard equipment, and one of them was a round Ingersoll-faced young man from Connecticut by the name of George Ford. He had a bouncing cheerfulness about him and would laugh at anything , but he had absolutely no restraint or control if anything really struck him funny. Whenever we played "The Stars and Stripes Forever," the piccolos all marched down to the footlights for that famous piccolo part, and one time a woman was sitting in the first row of the Denver Auditorium examining us from not more than six feet away through a pair of large field glasses. Well, George started to tremble and quiver and shake and roll and wiggle his fingers helplessly 36 around his sputtering piccolo. It was only a question of time till we all lost control, and for the rest of the piece, there the six of us stood, hors de combat, as you might say, doggedly clutching our instruments in playing position, completely unable to make a sound. In quieter moments George Ford had the fastest triple tongue of any flute player I ever heard. I asked him one day how he learned to do this so well, and his happy face opened like a quarter to three...