Duke University. Office of Alumni Affairs.

The Duke Ambassadors was an independent, student run, thirteen piece dance band founded by Sonny Burke '37 that was a staple of the Duke University social scene for thirty years.

Since 1838, Duke University has had two locations and five name changes, but one of its oldest components has been an active alumni association. The Trinity College Alumni Association was founded in 1858 by President Braxton Craven, with forty-one alumni on record. In the 1890s, when the proposal to relocate Trinity College to Durham was announced, opposition to the plan was widespread among alumni. The Alumni Association, however, listened to the arguments for relocation with an open mind and decided to put the interests of "a greater Trinity" above personal considerations. In 1891, a year before the move, the College's charter was amended to require that one-third of its trustees be alumni of the College. This tenet remains a requirement of the University's bylaws today, twenty-seven of Duke's thirty-seven trustees are alumni, and five are past presidents of the Alumni Association.

Within a decade of the move to Durham, both men and women enrolled in dramatically increasing numbers from the North, the South, the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) and abroad (especially Japan). Today's Duke Alumni Association represents more than 110,000 members from every state in the USA and more than seventy countries.

Just as the pool of alumni has dramatically grown and changed over the last 150 years, so has the role of the Alumni Association. From an association intended to foster friendships and maintain an ongoing affiliation between alumni and the university, the Alumni Association now also provides educational and travel opportunities, along with many university and community services. It disseminates information about university activities and issues to alumni and friends of the university, and produces its own sources of revenue to help support its programs.

These changing roles are expressions of an ongoing review by Alumni Association leadership and members of the alumni community. They illustrate the Alumni Association's ability to recognize the university's continually changing needs and its own opportunities to contribute to the Duke community.

[Historical note from http://dukealumni.com]

The Duke Ambassadors were an independent, student run, thirteen piece dance band founded by Sonny Burke '37 that was a staple of the Duke University social scene for thirty years. They were fixtures at the "Sunday Night Sings" in Baldwin Auditorium leading the students in group sings like "follow the bouncing ball," and audience participation events like "So you want to be a Band Leader."

The Duke Ambassadors also had a presence off-campus traveling to locations such as Tantilla Gardens in Virginia Beach, Palisades Park in New Jersey, and even to Reykjavik, Iceland. At the outbreak of the United States involvement in WWII the music halted while men signed up and were called up to promote the war effort. The first post war performance of the Duke Ambassadors found them back at a "Sunday Night Sing" on East Campus in 1947.

During the 1950s at the request of the U.S. State Department the Duke Ambassadors made several overseas appearances in places such as the Azores, Bermuda, and Panama. They were also a fixture during this time throughout North Carolina performing annually at the Governor's Ball, and at Fort Bragg, Cherry Point Naval Base, as well as at nearly every college and university in the region. The Duke Ambassadors disbanded in 1964. Band leaders included Sonny Burke '37, Vince Courtney (killed in WWII), Sammy Fletcher '47, James "Benny" Steele '53, and William R. "Bill" Pape, Jr. '57.