Originally aired on March 24, 1995 - In part 30 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson talks about the profound effect the Civil War had on our body of music.
#30 – Civil War Music
Nothing in American history has produced more music than the Civil War. Nothing in our annals comes even close to it. The first song appeared three days after hostilities began. By the time of Appomattox four years later, more than 2,000 melodies had been added to the American heritage. That averages out to one song for every day of the war.
Why so much music? For one thing, and in that day, hardly anyone was so uninhibited as not to feel that he could write a song. Civil War soldiers added verses to a tune called McClellan’s Retreat until the song became as endless as the World War I soldier-song, Mademoiselle from Armentieres.
A stronger factor behind the outpouring of music in the Civil War is the fact that the songs of that war are filled not so much with hatred of the enemy as they are with ideals. Although civil war cut this nation in half, music gave North and South a spiritual oneness.
It was also during the mid-19th Century that a distinctive melodic style emerged with a national flavor. Evangelical in character, these melodies were a unique amalgamation of black and white spirituals, of gospel tunes and minstrel songs. The development at the same time of the piano and four-part harmony gave an even greater boost to the music of that age.
Next to letter-writing, music was the most popular diversion in the armies of the 1860s. Men left for war with song on their lips; they sang while marching and they sang while standing behind earthworks; they hummed melodies going into battle; music swelled from every nighttime bivouac.
Civil War armies had a deep sense of sentimentality. Hence, the most popular songs in camp were not the martial, stimulating airs that folks back home (and generations of Americans thereafter) sang inspirationally. Instead, they were songs with tones of sadness and longing. The all-time favorite of Civil War soldiers was a song with these words:
Midst pleasures and palaces
Though we may roam –
Be it ever so humble
There’s no place like home”.
High also in popularity among the soldiers were Just before the Battle, Mother, Tenting Tonight on the Old Camp Ground, Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again, and an old English song that Americans proceeded to immortalize: Auld Lang Syne.
Among the many religious songs given birth by the Civil War was the moving Navy Hymn, written in 1861 by a Union chaplain. Many little-known hymns became unforgettable because of the American conflict. A case in point was an old Welsh air. Both Johnny Rebs and Billy Yanks adopted the song because of its appropriate sentiments:
Guard us waking, guard us sleeping, and when we die,
May we in thy mighty keeping, all peaceful lie;
And when death to life shall wake us,
Thou wilt in thy likeness make us;
Then to reign in glory take us, with thee on high.
Today one occasionally witnesses Southerners or Northerners who will hoot and holler when “their” Civil War songs are played. Such behavior, among other things, reflects a woeful ignorance of facts. Let it be remembered that Dixie was an 1859 song by Daniel Emmett, a Northerner who later served in the Union armies. One of the earliest Confederate poems was entitled The Southern Cross. It became the most popular lyrics in the war for the melody you and I know today as The Star-Spangled Banner. And in the mid-1850s William Steffe, a Southern composer of Sunday school songs, composed the music that ultimately became The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
Civil War music is not yours, or mine. It is our music, to enjoy together as Americans in a united land.
