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Saw "Stars & Stripes" the bio-pic about Sousa on television, and when one of the actors blew into that Raincatcher, man, was that a glorious tone.
Who played the tuba parts on the soundtrack?

I don't know who played on the sound track but the actor is a VERY young 22 year old Robert Wagner playing the part of Willie Little, a fictional tuba player. Sousa was played by Clifton Webb. This film was made in 1952 by 20th Century Fox with Henry Koster directing.

This was done under the old studio system. It would take a bit of looking but most movies made in Hollywood (or any other part of Los Angeles, or Culver City, or Universal City) before 1958 were played by the tuba player under contract with the studio.

It was not a free-lance job. They had a "normal" 30 hour work week. George Boujie was the contract tuba player at MGM in Culver City.

To find out who played in "The Stars and Stripes Forever," you would find out who the contract player was at 20th Century-Fox in West Los Angeles at that time.

Clarence Karella was the tuba player at fox.
Norm Pearson

The credits read that Alfred Newman, the 20th Century-Fox music supervisor, was the conductor for this movie. The musicians heard are contract musicians from Fox. So the tubist is Mr. Karella.

There might be recordings of the Detroit Concert Band used in the movie. This band had other great tubists than Bill Bell but I don't have my list in front of me right now. Maybe someone else could help here.

So then, what you're saying is that Robert Wagner actually didn't play that Raincatcher sousa, but "lip synched" it while someone else played it. I've always wondered about this about actual actors playing instruments.

There was a film in 1982 with a young Matt Dillon playing the sousaphone. Would he have just pretended to play too? From seeing this, I thought that Dillon actually played since the notes weren't that difficult. Any one of us could have done it.

Hank74

Actors usually receive some sort of training from a musical coach so that it looks like they know what they're doing on screen. The actual music being produced is either recorded first and lip-synched to on set, using an on-set playback device (Nagra tape or DAT deck, usually, with timecode or pilot-tone) or the music is dubbed in later, as was probably the case for the few sousaphone notes Wagner blew.

To hear/see some actors playing their own instruments, check out Russell Crowe's violin work in Master and Commander.

Also, I think it's pretty impressive that all the actors playing musicians in A Mighty Wind learned to play their isntruments for that film.