In 1992 I was asked to perform The Washington Post with mandolin and piano for “If You Knew Sousa,” an episode of The American Experience series on PBS. It was published for mandolin and piano when the piece was new, but I was not able to find an original copy, so I made my own arrangement, working from the band parts, and took a scan of the original cover from a piano version.

The published mandolin arrangements that I have seen for his other marches were usually somewhat simplified, and the accompaniments would be missing a lot of the details from the band version. My arrangement is a little more difficult, as I tried to make it more accurate to the original band version. The original mandolin arrangement would probably not have included any double stops or passages in octaves, and the original piano accompaniment would not have included the counter melodies in the trombone part.