John Philip Sousa's Violin: An American Original
The restoration of the iconic bandleader's first violin focuses attention on the beginnings of a remarkable career
“What’s waiting on your bench on Monday morning?” I ask violin maker and restorer John Montgomery. Several of us are sharing an airport taxi, making conversation on a sleety, grey spring day. “John Philip Sousa’s childhood violin” was the unlikely reply.
Sousa’s violin?
For the rest of the ride, Montgomery regales us with youthful tales from “The March King’s” little-
remembered early years as a child violin prodigy in Civil War–era Washington. Though most famous as a band leader and composer of marches, he was originally a successful violinist, conductor, orchestrator, and composer of, among other things, operettas.
Montgomery, who owns a violin shop in Raleigh, North Carolina, was just finishing a restoration of the little fiddle in time for the opening of “Winning the Hearts of Americans,” a new exhibit at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Virginia. As composer of “Semper Fidelis,” the official march of the US Marine Corps, and the bandleader who whipped the Marine Band into the crack touring ensemble that it remains today, Sousa is still very important to the Marines.
A Yearlong Restoration
Sousa, born in 1854, took up the violin at age six. “I feel for sure it had to be his first one,” Montgomery says of the violin. The fiddle itself is not remarkable—a quarter-size German student instrument of the sort imported by the thousands in the mid-19th century—“but it was such an important part of who he was, who he became.”
The construction methods, oxidization of the damaged wood, and the story that the Marine Corps gave Montgomery left little doubt that this instrument belonged to Sousa and was broken at the time he was a child.
The tiny violin was donated by the Sousa family to the ...
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