June 29, 2000

BIRMINGHAM, AL — The national march of the United States, “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” has an interesting origin, said Dale Misenhelter, Ph.D., assistant music professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

American composer John Philip Sousa was sailing home from Europe in 1896 upon learning of the sudden death of his band’s manager. He was standing on the deck of the ship when the music came to him.

“Sousa believed the piece was divinely inspired,” Misenhelter said. In Sousa’s autobiography, “Marching Along,” he wrote that at that moment, he began to “sense a rhythmic beat of a band playing within my brain.”

When he reached shore, he “set down the measures that my brain-band had been playing for me, and not a note of it has ever changed,” Sousa wrote in his autobiography.