This is Gary Davis’s take on a couple of marches, which were, like everything he played, transformed in his hands. The second section is a loose paraphrase of John Philip Sousa’s “Washington Post March”; I don’t recognize the first section; if someone else does, please let me know and I’ll rewrite this.
Like most of Davis’s instrumentals, I first heard this on the LP The Guitar and Banjo of Reverend Gary Davis. I would have been maybe twelve years old and have to admit I probably found this piece particularly appealing, maybe even more exciting than “Cincinnati Flow Rag” or “The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (and Playing the Guitar at the Same Time), because I could identify it with something other than ragtime-blues guitar, and play it for people who weren’t into those styles, and they might be impressed.
It was also the first Davis instrumental I learned, thanks to Sing Out!, which printed tablature for it in 1972. As I’ve explained in a previous post, the Cambridge Public Library, which was right next to my high school, had a surprisingly good music department, and among other things subscribed to Sing Out! 
I didn’t get there till 1973, but they kept five years of back issues, and around that time I read in Abbie Hoffman’s Steal this Book that libraries de-accessioned old magazines and would happily give them to anyone who asked, so I asked, and for the next couple of years got the six-year-old copies of old Sing Out! Then got a phone call that the library was stopping its subscription and I could pick up the whole remaining five years of copies…
…so I did, and still have them, including the one with tab for this, which it anachronistically titled “Civil War Parade.” The transcription was provided by Jack Baker, who I see is still giving guitar lessons and has tab online for lots of classic fingerstyle pieces, though not this one. I have no idea how accurate it is, since by the time I got serious about studying Davis’s playing, I was far more interested in his gospel and ragtime arrangements (like “Samson and Delilah,” “Goin’ to Sit Down on the Banks of the River,” “You Got to Move,” “Cincinnati Flow” and a bunch of others), and I never went back to work out how he played this one — with the result that I would guess what I’m playing here is pretty much what I learned from Baker’s tab.
I’m not a fan of military marches and pretty much put this aside, but it had an important role in my education, since it was the first piece I ever learned in the key of F — which became one of my favorite fingerpicking keys — as well as being the inspiration for “Perry’s March,” by Perry Lederman, which I recorded on my lone LP. And, more than fifty years later, though I’ve forgotten lots of other pieces I learned over the years, I find that I still remember how to play it.