Uncivil War Songs: The Two Soldiers

It's no secret that I do most of my "research" on the internet these days. I'm not a professional music scholar by any means, and don't get to travel around to study the archives of various university libraries, nor do I get to wander the hills with a tape recorder searching for yet-unknown variants of traditional songs.

But in spite of my rather sedentary life here in South-Central Wisconsin, there wonderful resources available online for serious and semi-serious folk song researchers. I've sung the praises of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library archive before, which houses the Roud database which gives me a lot of reference numbers, and there is the archive at Mudcat Cafe, which has been an active web-based forum for nearly as long as there have been web-based forums (since the mid-90s). There are other university archives available free online as well as any number of personal or professional sites that document these sorts of things, and quite a few traditional songs even have Wikipedia pages with high-quality links and references. For some reason, lots of people who play centuries-old music on acoustic instruments were among the early adopters of the whole internet thing, so folk music is pretty well represented in the Digital Age.

But, in spite of all the information available for online folk music study, and the ease of natural language search engines, it can be incredibly hard to track down information on a song if you don't know the right questions to ask.

This was a problem with this week's Dead Lover ballad, "The Two Soldiers," an American song from the Civil War era. It's been recorded several times in the past few decades, notably by David Grisman and Jerry Garcia and by Bob Dylan, but background on it seemed to be pretty scarce.

The song tells the story of a pair of Union soldiers moments before what would turn out to be a disastrous assault on a Confederate position. One asks the other that if he is killed, that his companion will relay his love and the news of his death to his sweetheart. The other replies that he will, and asks that in the case of his own death his friend bring the news to his poor mother. It shouldn't surprise anyone who's been following this blog to learn that they both end up dying, so neither Ma nor The Girl Back Home will get the message.

It's a pretty predictable story, with our Dead Lover (and a Dead Son) dying nobly in a doomed Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade style disaster, but it left me with a few questions. Was it based on any sort of true story, or at least a specific battle? When did it first appear? Who wrote it? And, interestingly, why does it seem to start not just in the middle of the battle, but in the middle of a conversation?

My usual opening move of typing the song title into Google turned up nothing but links to other recordings of the song, and a search for "Two Soldiers" in the Roud index turned up every song about either soldiers or two of anything, but I didn't see the particular song I was looking for (it turns out it was buried in the pile, but far enough down the list of results that I didn't see it in my first round of searching).

So I switched tactics and searched by the first line, "He was just a blue-eyed Boston boy," which is what gave me my first break. Instead of finding news stories about soldiers and a million songs about soldiers, I was able to find the specifics of the song I knew and wanted to learn about. One of the most interesting things I found was in an article from a 1997 edition of Inside Bluegrass magazine that told the story of how, exactly, the modern version of the song got its strange "middle-of-the-action" start. When the song was collected (by noted folk song scholars Alan and Elizabeth Lomax) the recording was split in two parts and stored in the Library of Congress archive. In the 1950s, Minneapolis musician Willard Johnson was building up his collection of old-time songs and, thinking the first call number listed in the archive was just introductory material, ordered a copy of the second half of the song. Other musicians picked up on his version and it became the regularly performed one.

Once I was able to find the rest of the lyrics, I learned that the song was, in its original form, often known as "The Last Fierce Charge," and was able to find its Roud number (629!) and a list of many, many variations. I also learned that the song derived from an anonymously published poem first printed in Harper's Weekly on February 7, 1863, and it was set at the Battle of Fredericksburg.

The battle, fought in December of 1862, just months before the poem was published, was a messy defeat for the U.S. Army. Union forces led by General Ambrose Burnside fought against entrenched and well-fortified Confederate troops led by Robert E. Lee. The "hill" referred to in the song was an elevated area called Marye's Heights on the west side of town where the Confederates had dug in. Union troops made multiple, unsuccessful attempts to take the hill and were forced back each time with heavy casualties (including, in the poet's imagination at least, the pair in the song). The loss shook confidence in the U.S. war effort and caused repercussions all the way up to Lincoln.

But the song isn't about the political ramifications or even much about the battle itself (it could have been set almost anywhere), but about the personal impact on a couple of the combatants. This is another peculiarity of American folk song. I mentioned earlier that songs from America, even if they were directly drawn from British or Celtic sources, tended to remove any mention of the supernatural. In the same vein, American folk songs are strangely reluctant to talk about the specifics of war.

The Scottish, based on their songs, can't seem to go hunting without getting into a scuffle and singing about it,  and actual battles seem to inspire multiple songs about what happened, but meanwhile, there are almost no traditional songs about the Battle of Gettysburg, for example, a three-day campaign that involved more than 200,000 men and saw 50,000 casualties. I'm not the first to point out that most of the popular songs from that era focused more on individual soldiers and the hardships they faced, rather than on the specifics of battles. And the mention of slavery was very rare as well, except for a notably badass stanza in Julia Ward Howe's Battle Hymn of the Republic:

"In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea

with a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me

as he died to make men holy let us die to make men free

while God is marching on"

It may be that, as a "modern" war of the industrial era, the Civil War didn't need songs to share the details of battles. There were plenty of newspapers and things like the telegraph and railroad made it easier for people to travel around and discuss things. It may also be that, unlike a border skirmish, the Civil War was too big and complicated, and these songs of small, personal tragedies gave people something easier to relate to.

You'll Catch Your Death Out There: The Banks of the Lee

Sometimes poring through the excellent online resources of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, or Mudcat.org or Wikipedia for information on a folk song yields all sorts of fun and interesting knowledge, either about the historical context of the song, its likely composer or famous performances. Sometimes, as in the case of this week's Dead Lover ballad, all you get is, "yep, that's a song that exists."

"The Banks of the Lee" (Roud v167) dates back to at least 1850, but beyond that has little information on it other than that it's been a popular song for a while. The "v" in its Roud Number indicates that it comes from the database's Broadside Collection, rather than having been recorded in the field by a wandering ethnomusicologist. This indicates that it may have been written by a professional for popular consumption rather than appeared through the magical process of folk music creation (yes, I am well aware that every "traditional" song had to have been initially written by SOMEBODY, but the fact that these songs entered the tradition anonymously and are part of a community tradition is part of their appeal to many of us).

But let's talk about broadsides, or broadsheets for a moment, in the context of music consumption and its parallels to the modern media. In the modern age, we have "singles," songs sold separate from a collection or album, initially on vinyl records, but currently as digital files or even Youtube videos. Usually modern singles are meant to promote an artist or work by being played on the radio with a variety of other music, and as such represent the best, or at least catchiest, song a musician currently has to offer.

Back in the days before recorded music, people still wanted to hear new songs and craved variety just as modern listeners do today, but as the phonograph didn't show up till the late 1800s, human beings just spent most of their history passing stuff along by ear, which probably meant a lot of songs had the same second verse of "nurr, nurr nurrr, hmmm, hmmmm, my love something-something la la."  (Joking aside, you will notice that certain phrases, metaphors and rhymes show up over and over, this is because it makes orally transmitted songs easier to remember).

At some point writing became a thing, and early forms of sheet music notation started showing up about 4,000 years ago. Through the Middle Ages music could be written down and shared across time and distance, but it had to by copied by hand, which meant a lot of time and labor and it was limited to mostly the church, the wealthy and professional composers. Then by the mid 1500s the printing press made distributing all sorts of writing more viable, including the words and music of popular songs. The cheapest way to print a document of any sort was a "broadsheet" or "broadside," which we in modern terms might call a "flyer," a single sheet of paper, printed on one side.

Songs printed on broadsides were sold cheaply and in large numbers, and spread songs to the masses. Some of them had musical notation with the melody of the song included, but back then a lot of folks could barely read the words, let alone musical notation. So the easiest way to make your song catch on was to set it to the tune of a traditional or popular song, and let people know you'd just written new words to a melody they already knew (in modern times, people call this "filk music," and think they're very clever for coming up with the idea). This accounts for the many, many folk songs that sound just like other folk songs but with different words.

Of course, sometimes, this leads to frustration for scholars and would-be performers, as the original song may be lost to history, so the little note at the bottom of the broadside that reads, "sung to the tune of..." is completely unhelpful. In these cases modern performers are free to set the words to whatever melody they feel like.

The Banks of the Lee was one of these songs likely written for a broadside. It did manage to catch on and has been performed by singers pretty consistently up to the present day. It tells the tale of two lovers along the River Lee in County Cork, Ireland (we can tell it's meant to be the Lee in Ireland not the River Lea near London because of multiple mentions of "wild Irish flowers"). It's not clear what the narrator's profession is, but in any case he travels away from his beloved Mary across the sea for a time, leaving her with the warning not to "stay out too late on the moorlands."

When he comes back, she's dead. It's not explicitly stated what kills her (werewolves?), but the fact that his warning not to stay out on the moors is included in the song suggests that the exposure to the elements on the cold, damp moor led to an illness that carried her off (I mean, she could have been eaten by werewolves, that would be a pretty good reason to stay off the moors at night). He then hangs out at her grave bringing her flowers.

It's a pretty sentimental song, almost a bit too sappy, especially in rhyming "dearly" with "sincerely," but it's redeemed a little bit with the hint of weather and wildness implied in spending a night on the moorlands. It's also sometimes sung slowly and excessively sentimentally, which I'm hoping to avoid in my version. I may not go full on alt-rock like Cordelia's Dad did in their version, but I plan on giving mine a little more bounce.

Everyone is Terrible: Matty Groves

So far we've talked about lovers dying in battle, lovers dying of disease, lovers dying of mysterious causes and lovers dying of... um, love, but this time we're going to take a trip into the land of the murder ballad, where the lovers are killed by the other lovers.

Matty Groves (Child 81, Roud 52) was first documented in 1658, though it may be older, and has many variations in the names of those involved and even the melody used, but the story is always the same. Some wealthy and powerful man is out of town and his wife picks up a young man to sleep with while he's away. The hot-tempered lord returns home to catch the adulterous lovers together and kills them, sometimes quite gruesomely.

This particular version, tells of Lord Arnold, Lord Arnold's Wife and Little Matty Groves, but there are Lord Ronalds, Lord Arlens and Lord Donalds, as well as Matty being spelled Mattie or being called Little Musgrave like the Christy Moore version of the song. The traditional melody of Matty Groves resurfaced in the United States in the 1800s in the much, MUCH more cheerful Shady Grove, which is the story of a young man courting.

But this project isn't about cheerful love songs, now is it? Let's talk about the bloody drama and gleefully sordid details of Matty Groves instead.

First off, this story starts off in church, where the titular Matty Groves catches the eye of Lord Arnold's wife. We don't get too much background on any of these folks, but it's interesting to note that the unfortunate Matty is the only one with a given name. The Lord and Lady in the story are only referred to by title, and in the lady's case, she's not even called "Lady Arnold" in this version, but simply "Lord Arnold's Wife" as if to stress the fact that she's married to a fairly important man, and by the way, she's married and yeah, this is going to end badly.

Matty, who clues in the song suggest is of a lower social station, is initially reluctant to give in to the lady's advances, but she persuades him that her husband is away and he's not going to get into trouble for having a little fun (foreshadowing), and it's possible the story could have ended there but for a loyal servant who, overhearing the seduction goes to fetch his boss.

The song skips over the salacious details of the tryst, and the next thing we know, Matty wakes up in bed to find a justifiably irate Lord Arnold looking down at him and the lady. Jealousy may have turned Lord Arnold into a violent rage monster, but he's an honorable violent rage monster, and he challenges Matty to a duel. When Matty objects, that as a poor man he has no sword to fight with, Lord Arnold offers to loan him the better of his own weapons, and furthermore to give Matty the first blow.

As an aside, this  may seem excessively generous of Lord Arnold, but it's worth bearing in mind that fighting with a sword is a learned skill, and while a highly motivated amateur can be extremely dangerous with a sharp weapon, it's very unlikely that they could hold their own against an experienced swordsman. We also hear Matty referred to throughout as "Little" Matty Groves, underscoring the fact that he's probably not as physically powerful as the lord.

What follows is as beautifully concise and brutal a description of a fight as I've ever come across:

"Matty struck the very first blow, and hurt Lord Arnold sore, Lord Arnold struck the very next blow and Matty struck no more."

"Little" Matty Groves becomes "Dead" Matty Groves pretty quickly and Lord Arnold sits his wife on his lap (mind you, she's probably still in some state of undress from her affair with Matty, and he's wounded and bloody, this is a gruesome parody of a sweet domestic scene), and cheerfully asks her who she likes better, him or a fresh corpse. The lady says she'd rather kiss the dead guy than "you in your finery," which Lord Arnold doesn't take well. Specifically he kills her. More specifically, the ballad tells us, "he struck his wife right through the heart and pinned her up to the wall."

Lord Arnold leaves his wife pinned to a wall by his sword (!!!) and calls for his servants to dig a hole and throw the two of them into a single grave, but to pile the lady on top because she came from a noble family. Presumably he then lights a cigar and walks away from an explosion like some cinematic antihero.

So... there's really no good guy in this story, though you can argue that cheating on a husband you didn't care for is probably less severe than murder. Or that sleeping with somebody else's wife is less severe than killing an unprepared peasant in a one-sided duel. It's worth noting that in a lot of times and places, the execution of an unfaithful wife would be looked on as a fair punishment, but the ballad doesn't really seem all that sympathetic to Lord Arnold. It's really just a sordid and bloody story about people doing bad things to each other, which makes it, of course, extremely entertaining and a classic of the genre.

It's interesting to see how many Dead Lover ballads seem to feature a wealthy young woman forced into an unhappy marriage. In fact, the unhappy marriage seems to be a common theme in a lot of these traditional songs, and it's almost always involving well-off people with lands and titles. It may be that for many centuries women were treated as bargaining chips to be used by their families to trade money and prestige, but based on the sheer number of times this comes up in song over the past four hundred years, it's also pretty apparent that at least part of society was really aware of this and didn't consider it a good thing.

It's also interesting to note that some of the exact language and situations come up in other songs, although with different outcomes. For example, in the slighly younger ballad "The Raggle Taggle Gypsy" and its variants (Roud 1, Child 200) a young lady runs off from her privileged position to follow a handsome vagabond, and while "Matty Groves" has the line "I'd rather one kiss from dead Matty's lips than you in your finery" the "Raggle Taggle Gypsy" has the line "I'd rather one kiss from the yellow Gypsy's lips than you in your finery." Mild racism aside, the later ballad  has a bit happier outcome than "Matty Groves" in that the young lady runs off to be poor and happy rather than rich and miserable.

To be fair, though, Lord Arnold's Wife does end up reunited with her lover as well.  They're together forever as Dead Lovers.

So... is this, like, a Steampunk thing?

First off, I didn't do a music video this week, I've been on the road for a bit of a family issue and haven't recorded any new songs. While the final recordings will likely differ a lot from the basic acoustic renditions I've been posting here, I still like to give you an idea what they sound like.

Anyway, one of the questions that I expect will come up, at least from a marketing angle, is whether or not this album will fit into the "Steampunk Music" genre. The flippant answer is "sure, if you want it to." The less flippant answer is, "I think this will fall into the realm of what many Steampunks find interesting in both terms of style and subject matter, though my specific goal isn't necessarily to produce a Steampunk album."

The argument over what does or does not constitute Steampunk Music is, of course, contentious and ongoing on the battlefields of the internet. It's also, to my mind at least, largely a kind of stupid one. My understanding of Steampunk and retro-futurism is that it's meant to encompass either a) an alternate historical period where technological and social development took a very different and more rapid course or b) a view of the modern or futuristic period filtered through the lens of Victorian-era fashion and technology. Either way, if this alternate timeline is to encompass the whole world, there should be as much variety in musical genres as there are in the allegedly real world that we inhabit.

With that in mind, most of the songs for the Dead Lovers Project are from the 1800s, in the sense that they were either written then, were first collected then, or were known to be popular then. This is not through random chance, the period that brought us the Industrial Revolution also brought an increased scholarly interest in folk and popular traditions in music. Francis Child, Cecil Sharp, Sabine Baring-Gould and their cohorts were active from the mid 1800s to the early 1900s, making folk song collecting a pastime closely associated with Victorian scholars, many of whom also fit the mold of amateur gentleman/scientist/scholars beloved of Steampunk stories.

The subject matter is deliberately dark, after all, I'm singing about death, which was also a bit of a Victorian obsession, as it is in some of our own subcultures, though it being me I have a sense of humor about it. I'm also planning to use a mix of traditional and modern instrumentation to accompany many of the ballads, though I'm not sure how stylistically weird I'm going to let myself get (drum loops and digital instrument, for example, are really not my style, but part of me says that I should experiment with them on at least a couple songs for just that reason).

So... is it Steampunk? It is if you want it to be.

(and, if you're booking paid gigs at a Steampunk event, then yes, it's ABSOLUTELY Steampunk music!)