Music of the American Civil War
On the battlefield, different instruments including bugles, drums, and fifes were played to issue marching orders or sometimes simply to boost the morale of one's fellow soldiers.
Each side had its particular favorite tunes, while some music was enjoyed by Northerners and Southerners alike, as exemplified by United States President Abraham Lincoln's love of "Dixie", the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy.
During the Civil War, when soldiers from across the country commingled, the multifarious strands of American music began to cross-fertilize each other, a process that was aided by the burgeoning railroad industry and other technological developments that made travel and communication easier.
The songs that arose from this fusion were "the first American folk music with discernible features that can be considered unique to America".
John Tasker Howard has claimed that the songs from this era "could be arranged in proper sequence to form an actual history of the conflicts: its events, its principal characters, and the ideals and principles of the opposing sides".
[2] In addition to, and in conjunction with, popular songs with patriotic fervor, the Civil War era also produced a great body of brass band pieces, from both the North and the South,[3] as well as other military musical traditions like the bugle call "Taps".
This was followed by a Union army regulation of July 1861 requiring every infantry, artillery, or cavalry company to have two musicians and for there to be a twenty-four man band for every regiment.
In July 1862 the brass bands of the Union were disassembled by the adjutant general, although the soldiers that comprised them were sometimes re-enlisted and assigned to musician roles.
[9] At the Battle of Five Forks, Union musicians under orders from Sheridan played Stephen Foster's minstrel song "Nelly Bly" while being shot at on the front lines.
[9] Samuel P. Heintzelman, the commander of the III Corps, saw many of his musicians standing at the back lines at the Battle of Williamsburg, and ordered them to play anything.
"When Johnny Comes Marching Home" was written in 1863 by Patrick Gilmore, an immigrant from Ireland, and was also enjoyed by both sides.
[16][17] The first song written for the war, "The First Gun Is Fired", was first published and distributed three days after the Battle of Fort Sumter.
"[19] Other songs played an important role in convincing northern whites that African Americans were willing to fight and wanted freedom, for instance Henry Clay Work's 1883 "Babylon Is Fallen" and Charles Halpine's "Sambo's Right to Be Kilt".
These publishers, based largely in five cities (Charleston, South Carolina; Macon, Georgia; Mobile, Alabama; Nashville, Tennessee; and New Orleans, Louisiana), produced five times more printed music than they did literature.
New versions of songs such as "Hail Mary", "Michael Row the Boat Ashore", and "Go Down Moses" emphasized the message of freedom and the rejection of slavery.
The first was the publishing of sheet music to "Go Down Moses" by Reverend L. C. Lockwood in December 1861 based on his experience with escaped slaves in Fort Monroe, Virginia, in September of that year.
[27] In Port Royal, escaped slaves learned the anthem, "America" in secret, never singing it in front of whites.
When the Emancipation Proclamation was passed, a celebration was held, and in a surprise to white onlookers, contrabands began singing the anthem, using the song to express their new status.
[28] The most popular white songs among slaves were "John Brown's Body" and H. C. Work's "Kingdom Coming",[29] and as the war continued, the lyrics African Americans sung changed, with vagueness and coded language dropped and including open expressions of their new roles as soldiers and citizens.
[30] Slave owners in the south responded by restricting singing on plantations and imprisoning singers of songs supporting emancipation or the North.
It was sung to the tune of "Glory, Hallelujah" and was later used by Julia Ward Howe for her famous poem, "Battle Hymn of the Republic".
"Sweet Home Alabama" by Lynyrd Skynyrd was described as a "vivid example of a lingering Confederate mythology in Southern culture".
[42] In 2013, a compilation album by current popular musicians, like Jorma Kaukonen, Ricky Skaggs, and Karen Elson, was released with the title Divided & United: The Songs of the Civil War.
