Something about John Philip Sousa wants to remain at arm's length. Certainly he is still a celebrity, eighty-some years after his death—his face instantly recognized, a really surprising amount of his music still familiar and still very much in the repertory, and at least the outline of his biography well known, I suppose, to most readers of Journal of the Society for American Music. Sousa has many fervent admirers and few detractors; even if you're sick to death of marches, it is hard not to respect the invention and craftsmanship of, say, The Fairest of the Fair. Yet there is something about the man that resists us, and it is well summed up in his publicity photographs: here he is on his horse, here with his gun, here with his boxing gloves, here with his band's baseball team. (If you have not seen them, they are printed on pages 93–96 of the book under review.) Clearly, the pictures were meant to humanize him for an adoring public; but am I the only one who finds them a little embarrassing? Like he's trying too hard?

This, I have long thought, is the central problem of Sousa scholarship: just about everything we collectively know about him comes from his press agents. Sometimes it is easy to spot, as in those photographs. More often, it is more insidious, as with the meticulously kept press books that have made research on Sousa and his band so much more convenient; all those individual newspaper clippings from all over the world give the illusion of independent opinions, until you read enough of them to see how much they share and realize how much had been fed to the editors by his publicists as the band traveled around.Footnote ¹ What we know, in other words, is what Sousa and his organization wanted us to know: it is a carefully crafted public persona, and, like all such constructions, it starts to ring false after only a few generations have passed.

Patrick Warfield's new book gets around this problem in a wise and brave way by stopping (more or less) in 1893, just as Sousa's own band is forming and his publicity machine is starting its work. The book is divided into three sections: “The Apprentice,” which takes us from Sousa's birth in 1854 to the end of his apprenticeship in the Marine Band in 1875; “The Professional,” which concerns his career in the theater, mostly in Washington and Philadelphia, and then with the Marine Band again, through the 1880s; and “The March King,” which mixes the story of the formation of the Sousa Band in 1892 with an examination of the music. They all add up to a really extraordinary piece of scholarship and writing.

Warfield does all that we expect a biographer to do: he has unearthed an impressive amount of information about Sousa's family, the institutions of which he was a part, the musicians around him, and so forth. Thus, on one level, this book appears to be a conventional biography—or, maybe more accurately, the first installment of a multi-volume biography. (I don't think it is, though. Pity.) But it is on another level that the book really excels, via the sidelong glances that Warfield takes at Sousa, which bring him into three dimensions. Rereading the book to prepare for this review, having gulped it down on the plane on the way back from the Pittsburgh American Musicological Society meeting where I bought it, I was surprised at how often, how long, and how far afield Warfield digresses into fascinating explorations of the professional music scenes of Washington and Philadelphia, of the creation and management of Sousa's manly image, of the national-anthem biz in the late nineteenth century, of the daily life and politics of the Marine Band, all of them so deftly woven into their chapters that we overlook that we have strayed. And each time, when we get back, a little more of Sousa the human has been exposed.

Best of all is Warfield's discussion of the music: a surprising study of some of Sousa's early songs from the Philadelphia period and an entire chapter, entitled “Theater on the Bandstand,” exploring his approach to the different genres of march that he inherited and the transformations in them that he made himself. Readers familiar with Warfield's introduction to his critical edition of six of the marches or his 2011 article on them will know how elegantly he writes about Sousa's music, what surprising depth he can find in what does not at first look all that deep.Footnote ² Only gradually do we start to see that the chapter title reveals the central point of the entire book: it was Sousa's early career as a theater musician and conductor that above all informed and guided the kind of music he wrote later on as a bandleader.

Well, dear reader, I liked it. John Philip Sousa is not an easy musician to write about. He was himself, and he was (as he wanted to be) a symbol, and he remains the kind of symbol that can polarize people a hundred years later. Sousa invites hagiography and snark in about equal measure, and he has had his share of both. Warfield's gift is to find the man interesting—neither godlike nor faintly embarrassing, but interesting. You will too. This is a beautiful book.