Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,070

This is the grave of Thomas Coates.

Born in 1803 in Easton, Pennsylvania, Coates grew up without much. He did learn music though and left home by the time he was 10 years old to play in a circus band. It didn’t really work out. The band abandoned him for some reason or another while in South Carolina. Again, this is a 10 year old. But he managed to make a go of it, played with other bands, and survived. He was a cornet player and evidently a quite good one. In 1824, back in Easton, he was part of a Pomp’s Cornet Band, playing for Lafayette on his grand tour of America that was a last gasp of the revolutionary generation.

Coates became known as one of the best horn players of his time and was in demand everywhere in the decades before the Civil War. P.T. Barnum hired him to conduct his Hippodrome Circus band. He later ran Pomp’s Cornet Band too. In August 1861, he led the entirety of the Pomp band into the Army. Everyone figured brass bands would be good for morale. They stayed for awhile, only being mustered out in September 1862, as the military was professionalizing and also trying to limit distractions and high costs, which is what having an entire brass band floating around really was.

Coates continued to lead his band for most of the rest of his life. Brass band music was super popular. He wrote and published songs too. One of his best known songs was “Twelfth Funeral March.” That was played at the funeral of Ulysses S. Grant in 1885. Mostly, he and his band played in the greater eastern Pennsylvania area, which at that time was pretty prosperous and not just in Philadelphia. If you go to Easton today, you can see the physical monuments to the significant wealth that was once in that community, both in the houses and the downtown buildings. To say the least, it has not maintained that wealth to the present.

Coates died in 1895 in Easton. Heart disease got him. He was either 91 or 92, so that was a pretty good heart, especially for that era.

Thomas Coates is buried in Easton Cemetery, Easton, Pennsylvania. I did not go to this cemetery to visit him per se, but if you are going to give me the so-called “father of American band music,” well, OK, that seems worth an entry, short as it may be.

If you would like this series to visit other 19th century musical figures, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Plus, this is my 52nd birthday, so you should celebrate this completely banal and unimportant day with making sure I get used to my soon to be surroundings in the boneyard. Stephen Foster is in Pittsburgh and Louis Gottschalk is in Brooklyn. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.