Music as a Gateway to History

There’s more to that “folk song” than meets the eye

Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt’s land…

The first time I saw those lyrics was in second grade Sunday School*, a few weeks before Passover – and we took them literally. It would be another year or two before I learned those words actually referred to Harriet Tubman, escaped slave and conductor on the Underground Railroad.

A few years later, our school Music curriculum included a few filmstrip-and-record presentations that highlighted songs such as “We Shall Overcome” and “United Nations, Make a Chain”** along with “If I Had A Hammer” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” in the discourse about the post-World War II era’s need for international understanding and the desire for peace (I don’t remember if Civil Rights were touched upon at all; this was in the early 1970s). The thing is, I remember the songs, but not the narration.

These were probably my first exposures to music – specifically, song (and more specifically, songs presented as part of the “folk”genre) – as a form of remembering and retelling history.

When we learned “You’re A Grand Old Flag” in fourth grade, my father informed me that during World War II, they sang different lyrics: instead of “forever in peace may you wave”, it was “forever in truth” – and instead of “Ev’ry heart beats true under red, white, and blue/ Where there’s never a boast nor brag”, they sung “We will fight, we will win; we will never. give in,/ And our courage will never lag”. Lesson: lyrics can change to serve political ends. [Note: I just learned that we were only taught the chorus. Wikipedia’s entry includes George M. Cohan’s verses and an early recording which references both Daniel Decatur Emmet’s “Dixie’s Land” and Henry Clay Work’s “Marching Through Georgia”. See my previous story, Lost Verses, for other examples of political editing.]

Fast forward a few years, and I picked up a copy of Tennessee Ernie Ford Sings Civil War Songs of the North at a sidewalk sale. It might have been in the liner notes, or in a short piece about an overnight cease fire in my dad’s old English textbook, that I read something to the intent of “the South would have won the war if we had better songs”. I was naive enough – or perhaps curious enough – to wonder about the real effect of popular, partisan songs on combatants’ attitudes and performance – to the point that I chose to write my my AP American History term paper on “The Effect of Civil War Songs on the Civil War Soldier”. My psychological analysis was utter BS, but I had the most fun I ever had doing a term paper, going down the rabbit hole of both sides’ songs and their backgrounds, the other side’s variant lyrics, the proliferation of parodies from both sides, and finding where some of those tunes really started***.

In the process, I learned a lot about period prison camps (the North’s were at least as bad as the South’s), supply train issues, the issues Lincoln had with his various generals, and the classism that caused some enmity between enlisted patrician Confederate volunteers and the conscripted, less wealthy men who often outranked them.

For most of my adult years, my deep dive into Civil War Era songs was just one of those odd collections of trivia that people pick up along the road of life, not unlike those folk who can remember every single lyric for every single song the Beatles recorded (both as a group and individually) or those who can point out every single continuity error in the corpus of Star Trek or Doctor Who TV episodes. (FWIW, I recall more the jist of a lot of the alternate and parodied lyrics than the lyrics themselves, and more first verses than complete songs.)

In my late thirties, I acquired a collection of “Irish Folk” music which included both historical ballads (“The Wexford Massacre”, “The Black Velvet Band”) and more modern politically-charged songs (the Grehan Sisters’ “On The Galtymore Mountains”), as well as a copy of the Clancy Brothers’ The Rising of the Moon: Irish Songs of Rebellion. These songs — both new to me, and new lyrics to familiar tunes (“The Rising of the Moon” and “The Wearing of the Green” share the same tune) made me ask questions such as, “What was the Wexford Massacre?” and “Who was Henry Joy?” Thankfully, we had already entered the Internet era and all I had to do was put a couple key words into a search engine to learn about the Irish Rebellion of 1798, Red Hugh O’Donnell (“O’Donnell Abou”), and what a “Croppy Boy” was. I also learned about the Potato Famine and the punishment known as “Transportation” (much of Australia, as well as the original American colony of Georgia, were set up as prison colonies, in which debtors and small-time criminals would be indentured to wealthy investors to work off their debts). In such a manner, I was able to learn a bit of Irish history that was not part of my formal educaation, and how some of it related to the waves of Irish immigration to the United States in the mid 1800s.

The key to all of this is that music is a form of storytelling, and that storytelling is a way of sharing history — events, people, and even cultural references — that can otherwise get lost. It’s a way to entice people who normally wouldn’t study history to learn more about a people, an era, a conflict that would not otherwise have entered their consciousness. It’s a way to explore alternate viewpoints, see “the other side”, and become a more rounded individual.

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• * Many young Jewish children who don’t go to Hebrew Day School (cheder, or during the High School years, yeshiva) start their religious training in Sunday morning classes.
• ** “Hold On” has several sets of lyrics. Josh White (WWII/Cold War specific) and Pete Seeger (Christian lyrics) are the only two sets of lyrics I’ve been able to find. Neither includes the verse, “Now the war is over and done/Let’s keep the peace that we’ve begun”. The song has its origin in the gospel song “Hand on the Plow”.
• *** I’ll never again see “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” as anything other than an attempt to spin an Irish anti-war ballad (“Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye”) into a clarion call for war. (Read the “Talk” page on the Wikipedia entry as well as the main page, as the discussion asks for links to the scholarship that places the Irish lyrics later than the American ones.) Less controversially, the tune for the Confederate song “The Bonnie Blue Flag” was taken from “The Irish Jaunting Car”.