Kindle version of vintage magazine article originally published in 1900. Contains lots of great info and illustrations seldom seen in the last 110 years.

Read excerpt -


"The first piece I ever had published I paid for. It cost me $25, and that $25 was a great deal of money to me; an awful lot. Of course, the piece did not sell. Some friends of mine with a great big gob of kindness in their hearts bought copies. I think about $4 worth. But the rest of the world, though it was hunting new tunes, paid no attention to the publication of my piece. It had not found me yet, and the fact that I was disappointed in the sale of my music did not disarrange its machinery in the least. The next time I thought I would try Philadelphia. I went up to the publishing house of Lee & Walker and showed my two compositions to the editor, with whom I struck up a friendship that has lasted ever since that day, and that was in 1872, when I was eighteen years old. He played over my pieces and they sounded beautiful. He was a good pianist, and I never have been. He made some kind of a cabalistic mark on them; I suppose it meant 0. K., and sent me down to see Mr. Lee. Mr. Lee liked the pieces, but I was a young man, an absolutely unknown young man, and all that you know what they all say. Still the pieces were very nice, and they would publish them, giving me, I held my breath—giving me one hundred copies of each piece. My railroad fare from Washington to Philadelphia and return and my hotel bill amounted to about $15, and for that I was to get one hundred copies of each of my two pieces, which would cost the publisher perhaps $7. I thought that was pretty hard. But I accepted. I supposed that the music would be printed off right away. It wasn't. After about a dozen letters from me during a period of six or seven months, I finally got word that they might get the piece out the following quarter."

"Now that you have made a hit, don't those pieces sell?"

Mr. Sousa shook his head and pressed his lips together. "The world does not turn back and look for what it has once passed by. It wants something new.

"After a while I sold my compositions for what I could get, anything from $5 up to $25. The 'Washington Post March' and the 'High School Cadet March' I sold for $35 each. They made an independent fortune for the publisher, Coleman, of Philadelphia."

"And all you got out of them was $70?"

Mr. Sousa nodded. He did not seem to feel bad about it. He seemed to think it was a kind of a joke on him, of course, but a good joke for all that. Probably he believes that there are more marches just as good where they came from. Probably he has got over grieving about it in the last ten years.