In 1895, Sousa wrote a comic operetta entitled El Capitan, which was a great success at its April 13, 1896, Boston premiere. It garnered 112 performances in New York and also created a sensation in Europe. Sousa extracted a march from it, using two of the operetta's most popular themes, and it too became a hit. Arrangements of it were subsequently made for various and quite exotic instruments, including piano, guitar, banjo, zither, and mandolin. But it was, of course, the band version of this march that achieved the most success then and the one that remains popular today. It opens with a theme similar to the ones in Sousa's King Cotton March (1895) and Liberty Bell March (1893), the latter quite famous in the 1970s and '80s from its use as the title music on the British television show Monty Python's Flying Circus. The El Capitan March theme has a bouncy exuberance and jovial spirit, quite suited to the comic nature of the operetta. Its latter half features the theme that appears at the operetta's close, a playful, carefree creation less march-like than the opening, but more colorful in its carefree, jaunty manner. The El Capitan March typically has a duration of two to two-and-a-half minutes.

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