All Americans are the spiritual heirs of the Civil War; but for my own micro-generation the relationship is peculiarly intense. All of us who are in our mature mid-fifties now were in our impressionable mid-zeros during the centennial, and the centennial was a very big deal. Yankees and Rebs was what we played in my neighborhood, and our plastic soldiers were blue and gray, and only the lack of materials impeded me from constructing a cheval de frise in the front yard. I imagine I speak for a lot of my contemporaries when I say that whatever else we may have become interested in over the years, our ears still perk up a bit when we hear of the 1860s.
I certainly did when I was given these two books—especially Harry Hall's monograph on the band of the 26th North Carolina Infantry, which was one of the most famous bands from the war, and by far the most famous Confederate band. This band is also known today because a remarkable six sets of its partbooks survive, including some of the finest band arrangements of the era. The regiment was raised in Salem, in Moravian country, so its band was part of a long tradition of distinguished brass playing, and in fact there are a number of Moravian chorale tunes in its surviving repertory.Footnote 1 Because of its unusual heritage and the large amount and quality of its repertory that we still have, the band of the 26th North Carolina Infantry deserves a serious full-length study. This book is not that study, however.
Hall took his story mostly from diaries, letters, regimental histories, church records, and the secondary literature on the war. Thus there is much background on the band's movements, band members’ life in camp, their changing fortunes as the war started to worsen for the Confederates, and so forth, but almost nothing about the music. A few pages from the partbooks are reprinted as illustrations, but without commentary, and they make only one brief appearance in his endnotes. However, as a view of the Civil War through the eyes of musicians, this book is profoundly absorbing, and the focus on daily nonmusical life is a salutary reminder that these men were in a war that occupied their attention more urgently than their waltzes and quicksteps. But still, music historians encountering this book will find themselves wishing for more music. Whoever eventually decides to write about their music will find Hall's book invaluable.
I may have taken up Christian McWhirter's Battle Hymns more dutifully than enthusiastically, but I quickly changed my attitude. This is a terrific book, and there are at least three ways to read it. One is just to read it, front to back, without stopping for the notes, and get his central message about the immense and varied importance of music, music of every kind, to the war effort, in the field and on the home front, on both sides.
Another way is to use it as a convenient compendium of what's out there to be known and what has already been done. Just about every paragraph has a note number after it, and the notes reveal the astonishing number of primary and secondary sources behind every bit of elegant and effortless prose. I have already lent the book out once, to a former student of mine who was interested in the case of a fellow Memphian, Herman Arnold, who claimed to have written “Dixie.” There, on pages 66–67 and 198–99, was the whole story, taken care of in a couple of paragraphs, with notes to some eight disparate sources, which she happily tracked down on her way to making her own judgment. I expect to repeat this experience often in the years to come.
The third way of reading McWhirter's book is as a rather inspiring example of how to deal with song lyrics from a long time ago. For a more or less random specimen, here's what he has to say about a song I had never heard of.
In “Sambo's Right to be Kilt,” Halpine used several techniques and accomplished several goals. By claiming the song was popular and authentic, it became both. Furthermore, Halpine's message of supporting United States Colored Troops (USCTS) for practical reasons, instead of humanitarian ones, appealed to northerners who had no great moral objection to slavery. His use of Irish dialect further increased the song's persuasive power by making it appear more legitimate to those who did not recognize it as a caricature—and those who did merely took it as a joke (94).
He quotes the song in an earlier paragraph, and what you are imagining is about right (and you can understand why it has not remained in the canon); but for now, read that passage again and see what complex thoughts are folded into each sentence—how subtly he understands and balances the message the song had for different constituencies and the tools the songwriter used to ensure it. There is a vast amount of material in Battle Hymns, and although McWhirter has an impressive command of the culture(s) he is writing about, he also has the great gift of making the telling of this complex story look easy.
But the Civil War is never easy. Anyone who is not at least a little ambivalent about it, even at the distance of 150 years, is just not paying attention. The war was won a long time ago, and won, I have no doubt at all, by the good guys; but I am also aware that where I live now, not all my neighbors agree even now. The music of the Civil War still has the power to wound, as I, and the rest of the Society for American Music Brass Band learned after playing music from the partbooks of the 26th North Carolina Infantry at the SAM meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina in spring 2012. So here's to the historians, and especially the music historians, who try to tell a complicated and still emotional story well, and here's to the Civil War bicentennial in the 2060s, when maybe the “Battle Hymn” and “Dixie” alike will be nothing more than relics of a struggle long past. But I am not optimistic.
