“Grand Canyon Suite” Composer Passes Away – April 1972

Yesterday’s post was about the Admiral King Marching Band and the uniforms its members wore while performing at football games and parades. 

When the football season was over, however, the band would shift gears and become a regular concert band (with the appropriate adjustments in instrumentation, especially in the percussion section). Many times, the director would hand out music for us to play, just to see what a particular arrangement sounded like, and to see if it was something that might be usable for a concert. Often these were just pieces that had been in the AKHS musical archives.

It was fun running through these pieces, although sometimes after we played them (if it sounded wretched enough), we were instructed to hand it back in again. If I remember correctly, one of these compositions that we rehearsed, but never played in a concert, was “On the Trail,” part of The Grand Canyon Suite by Ferde Grofé.

That was the first time I had ever heard it. As with all things Western, I immediately liked it, with its clip-clopping sound of a donkey or mule making its way along the trail down into the Canyon. 

Here’s “On the Trail” in its entirety, in a full orchestral arrangement with strings (in contrast to the concert band version we played). The well-known clip-clopping theme starts around one minute and twenty seconds into it.

The whole Grand Canyon Suite is great (check it out), but it’s “On the Trail” that was the most well-known part. Bits of it were even used in A Christmas Story.

Anyway, fifty years ago this month, Mr. Grofé passed away. Here is his obituary that appeared in the Journal on April 4, 1972.

If he had only composed The Grand Canyon Suite, that accomplishment alone would have been enough to cement Grofé's place in music history. But he contributed many more great compositions, and even arranged George Gershwins’s Rhapsody in Blue – originally written for two pianos – for a full orchestra. Grofé’s famous arrangement is the one that we all know and love today.