“Washington Post March”

Abstract

The Europe family found a bustling city that was both quite different from, and yet surprisingly similar to, the one they had left “down home”. Washington had grown dramatically since the Civil War in its public as well as private aspects. James, who was called “Jim”, attended the third grade at Lincoln Grammar School on Capital Hill. It was about this time that he first began to study the instrument that would be his first love—the violin—under Joseph Douglass. In addition to his musical aptitude, Jim Europe demonstrated a strong personality and a natural organizational ability. John Philip Sousa, who had been dubbed the “March King” for such compositions as “The Washington Post March” and “Semper Fidelis”, and the Marine Band itself had a long-standing relationship with the African-American community in Washington. With his outgoing personality and his musical interests, Jim Europe was quickly recruited into the high school cadets. A twenty-year-old violinist named Will Marion Cook undertook to provide Washington and its black community with an orchestra. Although Cook was eleven years older than Europe, the lives of the two Washingtonians would intersect later in significant ways.