Monday, July 25, 2016

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.








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