Civil War songs: the ones they actually sang, and one that can have you in it

Ask ten people to hum a Civil War song and most of them will hum the same slow fiddle tune. It is a beautiful tune. It is also from 1982. That fact is a good place to start, because the real Civil War songs are stranger, funnier and sadder than the one everybody remembers, and because I sell a Civil War song that did not exist until you fill in a form. I will get to that at the end. First, what they actually sang.

The most famous Civil War tune was written in 1982

"Ashokan Farewell" is the waltz that runs under Ken Burns's The Civil War. Jay Ungar wrote it in 1982 and named it after the Ashokan Field Campus in upstate New York, where he and Molly Mason ran a fiddle camp. Burns used it twenty-five times across the eleven hours of the series, nearly an hour of film in all, and it is the only modern piece on the soundtrack. Everything else is period music. The tune played under the Sullivan Ballou letter in the first episode, which is why so many people are certain it is a soldier's song from 1861. It is not. It is a New York fiddler's homesick tune from a summer camp, and it happens to sound exactly like what we think the war sounded like.

I bring this up not to spoil anything but because it is the whole subject of this site in one example. What sounds true and what is true are different questions, and you have to check.

The Union songs

"Battle Hymn of the Republic." Julia Ward Howe wrote the words in Washington on November 18, 1861, after hearing soldiers singing "John Brown's Body," and the Atlantic Monthly printed the poem in February 1862. The tune was already there. William Steffe's camp-meeting melody dates from around 1856, and the John Brown words had been set to it first. Howe's version outlived both. The Library of Congress essay on the song has the full chain.

"The Battle Cry of Freedom." George F. Root, 1862, Chicago. Estimates put more than 700,000 copies of the sheet music in circulation, and Root's publisher is said to have had fourteen presses running and still could not keep up. It was so good that the Confederacy took it. H. L. Schreiner and W. H. Barnes rewrote the words for the South, and both armies marched to the same chorus with opposite meanings.

"When Johnny Comes Marching Home." Patrick Gilmore, 1863. The one everybody knows from school. Gilmore was a bandmaster in the Union army, and the song is about the homecoming rather than the fight, which is why it kept getting sung through every war after.

The Confederate songs

"Dixie." The South's anthem was written in New York City by an Ohio man. Daniel Decatur Emmett composed it for Bryant's Minstrels, who first performed it at Mechanics' Hall on Monday, April 4, 1859, two years before the war. The South adopted it wholesale. And on April 10, 1865, the day after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Lincoln asked a band outside the White House to play it, saying the Union had fairly captured the tune along with everything else.

"The Bonnie Blue Flag." Harry McCarthy, 1861, named for the single-star flag some Southern states raised before the Confederate flag existed. In the South it ran second only to Dixie, and it is the one reenactors still argue about at camp.

The songs both sides sang

This is the part that gets me. The two armies shared a language, a hymnal, and a sheet-music trade, and the songs that lasted were the ones that did not take a side.

"Lorena." Published in 1857, words by Henry D. L. Webster and music by Joseph Philbrick Webster. A man remembering a woman he lost. Soldiers on both sides sang it in camp and thought about home, and there is a story that a Confederate officer blamed the song for the South's defeat because it made the men too homesick to fight. That story is repeated everywhere and sourced nowhere, so treat it as lore.

"Home! Sweet Home!" In the winter of 1862 to 1863 at Fredericksburg, the bands of both armies traded tunes across the Rappahannock, Union songs answered with Southern ones, until somebody struck up "Home! Sweet Home!" and both sides played it together. Accounts of the same thing survive from Stones River. It is the kind of story that sounds invented and is not.

"Taps." Not a song, but the most played piece of music to come out of the war. Union General Daniel Butterfield arranged it at Harrison's Landing, Virginia, in July 1862, to replace an older French lights-out call. His bugler, Oliver Wilcox Norton, sounded it first. Within months, both armies were using it, and it has been the standard close to a U.S. military funeral since 1891.

What the music was for

Robert E. Lee said he did not think they could have an army without music. Philip Sheridan said music had done more than its share to win the war. Both men were talking about the same thing from opposite sides. Regimental bands played the men into camp and out of it, drummers carried the orders, buglers ran the day, and a soldier who could sing was worth something after dark.

The Library of Congress Civil War sheet music collection holds more than 2,500 pieces from the period, written from both sides while it was happening, before anyone had decided what the war meant. The cover art alone is worth an evening. Generals, battlefield scenes, cartoons, mourning wreaths. It was a working industry, and it was selling to the people who were living it.

Modern songs about the Civil War, and the one I wrote

There are not many good ones. Most modern Civil War songs are either film music or a country singer doing a costume drama. The one already in my catalog is Just 18 During the Civil War, and it is about a real eighteen-year-old: Will Cody, later Buffalo Bill, a private in Company H of the Seventh Kansas Cavalry. That regiment fought at Tupelo in July 1864 and then chased Sterling Price across Missouri that autumn, including the fight at Westport on October 23. I wrote about what Cody did with the rest of his life, and what he got wrong in his own story, in the Buffalo Bill post.

The sound of that song is period rather than country on purpose. Fiddle, banjo, a parlor ballad shape. It was written as a proof of concept for what comes next.

The Muster: a Civil War song with your name on the roll

Thousands of people spend their weekends as Civil War soldiers. A unit, a rank, a kit assembled piece by piece over years, an impression they have worked on longer than most people work on anything. The Muster writes that soldier into a song.

You tell me your side, your unit the way you say it, your rank, your long arm, the one thing you carry, who is waiting at home, and the battle you would want to be remembered at. There are twenty-two on the roster, in three theaters: the Eastern from First Manassas to Appomattox, the Western from Fort Donelson to Nashville, and the Trans-Mississippi from Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge to Westport and the Missouri guerrilla war. If yours is not on the list, tell me, and I will say honestly whether it can be written.

Every battle detail gets checked against the histories before a line goes down. If what you told me does not square with the record, I write to you about it rather than quietly changing it, which is the same rule that runs the fact checks page. Two more rules, and they are not negotiable: the cause is not written as righteous on either side, and there are no slurs in it, even in a song set a hundred and sixty years ago. The full version is on the content policy.

It is $297. You get a three-to-four-minute ballad in the period sound, an Ultra-HD master, cover art, a lyric sheet, two rounds of revisions, and a CD in the mail, in about ten days. You build the soldier first and pay after, so the form costs nothing to try. You can muster in here and go straight to the form, or read the full offer first on the custom songs page, under The Muster.

More from the catalog

Everything I have released is free to play on the listen page. If you want to know how a song gets from a form to a finished master, that is on how it works. And if you would rather ride with the outlaws than march with the infantry, the Posse does the same thing for the Old West, on the same page.