The Truth About Sousaphones...

When John Philip Sousa thought up of the idea of the sousaphone he wanted a huge TUBA that would be portable and could be played in any environment.  The picture here was what he came up with. The first one was built by J.W. Pepper & Sons out of Philadelphia in 1893. The biggest difference between this and the currently produced sousaphones is that the original sousaphone had a bell that pointed straight up in the air. As Pepper got out of the musical instrument business and concentrated on sheet music, C.G. Conn, Ltd., began to start taking credit for the creation of the instrument. Upright sousphones are nicknamed raincatchers for obvious reasons.
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This is a modern helicon with rotary valves. They also come with piston valves. The helicon predates the sousaphone by about 35 years and has always been more popular  in Europe than in North America, although the Purdue University marching band used helicons until about 1925 when they were replaced with raincatcher sousaphones. Unlike the raincatcher sousaphones, which ceased production over 80 years ago, helicons are still being produced today.
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Front facing bells (correct term is "recording bells") were introduced in the early twentieth century. The reason for the directional bell was not for marching, as Sousa's attitude that "the tuba bells should always point up, spreading that thick layer of bass sound over the band like icing on a cake" was a fairly common way of thinking up through the 1930s. Any time recording devices or amplification was used called for a directional bell.
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Tubas like this came out around 1907. It is called a recording bass (not a recording tuba). Younger tuba players get really irritable about that word BASS as it applies to the tuba. I know I did when I was 14, but it went away very quickly, after I turned 15. The reason this is a recording bass is that it took the place for the string bass on orchestra recordings. Tubas got a whole lot of repertoire during that era that they would never have again, thanks to archaic recording methods of the time. (Remembering that the tuba wasn't even invented until 1835, there were a lot of good composers who were dead by that time.) Just remember, call this a recording bass and not a recording tuba and your intelligence will be rewarded. Don't be like the ignorant musical instrument store managers who call this an upright tuba with a front bell. Bad. Bad. Bad.
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I think the real confusion of the 14 year old tubists and their mothers who believe everything their sons tell them is, what do you call this thing? Yes, to a music store owner, it's a tuba. That's how it's written in the Conn catalog. They are the only people for whom this idea that A SOUSAPHONE IS NOT A TUBA really matters because you don't want to order something like this and end up with a sousaphone. You have to be smarter than that.
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Another problem (according to the 14 year old tuba players and their mommies) is that the idea of throwing around the idea that a sousaphone is a marching tuba and the 13 year old newbie tuba players will start calling this a sousaphone. (A good solution for this is not to buy these and they will go away.) This is called a "marching tuba" but any of the tubas (and that includes sousaphones, kiddies) on this list can be used as a marching band instrument. We used German upright tubas lots of times for parades and military reviews when I was in the U.S. Army band program. I wonder what Jean Shepherd, who played tuba in the Army band program in the 1940s and often got into a tizzy over "uneducated idiots" referring to sousaphones as tubas...
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Just so you know, this is the only instrument on this list that isn't a tuba. "What is it?" asks the mother from the Beavertail Cactus High School Opuntia Marching Band Booster Club. You don't know? And you are trying to tell me that a sousaphone is not a tuba and you really don't know why except that it confuses some music store clerks who only got into music after they finished college. This is a cimbasso (don't worry about pronouncing it correctly... I doubt you would ever see one in a high school group...) It was created by a German musicologist in 1959 to take play the trombone parts in Romantic Italian operas and previously only seemed to work on tubas. Technically, it is a trombone, having a cylindrical bore giving it a raspier sound than a tuba. Tubas might be loud but, for the most part, having a conical bore, it's much gentler.
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This whole thing brings me back some 35 years when I played tuba with the 298th Army Band in Berlin, Germany. Since Berlin is in the part of Germany where most of the locals are Lutherans, the idea of Lent and Ash Wednesday aren't such big things. But in Southern Germany, the German version of Mardi Gras, which is called Fasching, is huge. This was at a time when it gets mighty cold in Berlin, so the Berlin Brigade had nothing for us to do. So in 1980, we were invited to do some ceremonies for the outpost in Fulda, Germany (near the Czech border). Fulda had lost its band in a downsizing of the Army in the 1970s. We did parades on post with our white fiberglass sousaphones (all we had at the time) and the commanding officer there hated what he saw although he didn't mention what it was until the following year. (Yes, we would be invited back. And this was an excellent gig.) But playing a sousaphone in the Fasching celebrations was a big burden... literally. The people watching us march from the street started placing gifts down our sousaphone bells: beer, candy, chocolate, canned fish, cookies, doughnuts, and even cake. I had to go to the post office so I could mail some of this stuff home! And yes, I knew beer wasn't mailable but I am a tee totaller, so I gave the suds to someone who did drink and could appreciate it.
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We found out what the Fulda commander (his name was Colonel John Sherman Crow) didn't like about the band. He said the band was beautiful, except for the four white toilets sticking up out of the back row of the marching formation. Of course he was talking about the white sousaphones. The Army in Berlin had better resources than most Army bands and we had these huge Alexander Kaiser tubas. We were told not to take our own instruments on the trip. If these horns got damaged, the Army would take care of them (I had a Mirafone 186-5U CC.) We went out on the parade field at Fulda in combat dress with the tuba players playing those Alexanders. As I got close to the reviewing stand I saw that Colonel Crow had a big smile on his face. After it was over he came to us and commended, "You all look so great without the tubas..."