I watched this movie growing up every time it was The Movie of the Week on TV and still like watching it and hearing all the music. My great-grandmother saw John Phillip Sousa and his band when they came to town when she was a little girl.
Surprisingly the soundtrack to this movie was made with extraordinary care! Resulting in not well known movie about a great composer, one of those standing firmly at foundation of modern American music. But it is a honest memorial and tribute to him.
He later remarked that it was a way to show the Northern people that the ex confederates were now our countrymen again. Their songs are our song and our songs are theirs. It was a way of saying that we always were brothers and we can go back to being brothers. We weren’t Yankees or Confederates anymore, we were all just Americans.
