Country Music Goes to War

Charles K. Wolfe, James E. Akenson, Charles K. Wolfe, James E. Akenson

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813187501
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

"Listening to the Beat of the Bomb" UPK author Charles Wolfe discusses his work and his new book Country Music Goes to War in the NEW YORK TIMES. While Toby Keith suggests that Americans should unite in support of the president, the Dixie Chicks assert their right to criticize the current administration and its military pursuits. Country songs about war are nearly as old as the genre itself, and the first gold record in country music went to the 1942 war song "There's a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere" by Elton Britt. The essays in Country Music Goes to War demonstrate that country musicians' engagement with significant political and military issues is not strictly a twenty-first-century phenomenon. The contributors examine the output of country musicians responding to America's large-scale confrontation in recent history: World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, the cold war, September 11, and both conflicts in the Persian Gulf. They address the ways in which country songs and artists have energized public discourse, captured hearts, and inspired millions of minds. Charles K. Wolfe, professor of English and folklore at Middle Tennessee State University, is the author of numerous books and articles on music. James E. Akenson, professor of curriculum and instruction at Tennessee Technological University, is the founder of the International Country Music Conference. Together they have edited the collections The Women of Country Music, Country Music Annual 2000, Country Music Annual 2001, and Country Music Annual 2002.

1

The Civil War in Country Music Tradition

Andrew K. Smith and James E. Akenson

Introduction

Fig 1. Cannon on ridge of Louisiana position at Vicksburg. (Photo by James E. Akenson.)

Despite lasting only four years—from 1861 to 1865—the American Civil War continues to fascinate the public and scholars in the United States and around the world. In recent years, Ken Burns’s Public Broadcasting Service documentary series generated intense interest. Annual reenactments at Civil War battlefields such as Shiloh and Chickamauga continue to attract thousands of spectators, and popular magazines such as Civil War Times may be found in Wal-Mart, as well as in supermarkets and gas stations. The July 2003 Smithsonian magazine featured “Making Sense of Robert E. Lee,” an article by Roy Blount Jr. Books such as Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998) and Jim Cullen’s The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past (1995) provide evidence of the general public’s interest in all things Civil War. In addition, the remarkable number of Web sites devoted to the conflict, such as the American Civil War Homepage (Hoemann 2003), reflects a strong popular appetite, not to mention continued scholarly activity and controversy of a voluminous nature. Even the daily news points out that the Civil War lives on. One need only look to newspapers to see controversies over the Confederate flag’s appearance in school dress (Smith 2003), on license plates (de la Cruz 2003), and in school presentations (Alligood 2003). Of all the historical events that live on in the public consciousness, the Civil War surely ranks as one of the prominent. William Faulkner believed that “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” The country music tradition provides a case in point about the enduring legacy of the Civil War, for, as Conway Twitty sang, it is indeed “a bridge that just won’t burn.” During the 140-plus years since its conclusion, the Civil War has made, and continues to make, its way into country music in a remarkable number of ways.

This essay focuses on Civil War–era material in the country music tradition, Civil War themes in individual songs, Civil War concept albums, and Civil War references in songs not overtly about the conflict; also considered are visual references on album covers and CD booklets. From Alabama, Dave Alvin, David Olney, Steve Earle, Claude King, Shenandoah, Johnny Horton, Brother Phelps, Tracy Lawrence, and Hank Williams Jr. to Jimmy Arnold, Johnny Cash, Jimmy Driftwood, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and fortunately obscure releases by Ku Klux Klan sympathizers, the Civil War does indeed live in the country music tradition. The examples provided are extensive, but not exhaustive, owing to the remarkable number of recordings by mainstream artists as well as artists who never made any visible impact on the mainstream or even alternative country music market.

Music during the Civil War

According to Wiley (1978b, 151), “[P]erhaps the favorite recreation of the Confederate Army was music.” Although new songs were written during the war—as evidenced by the large number of songbooks published between 1861 and 1865—the small list of camp favorites was largely made up of melodies familiar before the war. Among the favorites were “Home, Sweet Home,” “Lorena,” “All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight,” “Annie Laurie,” “The Girl I Left behind Me,” “Her Bright Eyes Haunt Me Still,” “Listen to the Mockingbird,” “Just Before the Battle, Mother,” “Dixie,” “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” and “Maryland, My Maryland.”

The lyrics were occasionally altered to reflect the times and circumstances. Thus, Confederate soldiers retreating from Tennessee after John Bell Hood’s unsuccessful December 1864 attempt to take Nashville most likely sang “The Yellow Rose of Texas” with these new words:

You may talk about your Beauregard

And sing of General Lee

But the gallant Hood of Texas

Played hell in Tennessee.

Fiddle music was especially in demand, to the extent that the price of fiddles escalated dramatically during the war. Popular tunes included “Hell Broke Loose in Georgia,” “Billy in the Low Ground,” “Arkansas Traveler,” “Money Musk,” “The Goose Hangs High,” “When I Saw Sweet Nellie Home,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Oh Lord Gals One Friday,” and “Dixie.”

The Confederate commander James Ewell Brown (“JEB”) Stuart enjoyed banjo music so much that he had Sam Sweeney, the younger brother of Joel Sweeney (a blackface minstrel said to be the “inventor” of the five-string banjo), transferred to his command. Sweeney, unfortunately, died of smallpox during the winter of 1864 (Thomas 1988, 280). With Sweeney playing banjo, Stuart would often sing songs such as “Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still” (sung by Eleazer Tillett and Martha Etheridge, the song was later “collected” by Anne and Frank Warner in 1951), “Lorena,” and “Jine the Cavalry” (Davis 1994, 69–70). Stuart may well have had a greater appreciation of music than Gen. Ulysses Grant, who disliked marching bands and claimed he could recognize only two tunes: “‘One was “Yankee Doodle,”’ he said; the other wasn’t” (Ward, Burns, and Burns 1990, 280).

Music was also popular in the Union Army; however, unlike the fiddle music favored by the Southern troops, “the music enjoyed most was that made by the soldiers’ own voices. Yanks went to war with songs on their lips” (Wiley 1978a, 158). Northern music publishers produced numerous songsters during the war. The most popular Northern song, “John Brown’s Body,” received new lyrics when Julia Ward Howe wrote “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in 1861, but soldiers apparently preferred the original song. Other popular Union songs were “Happy Land of Canaan,” “The Battle-Cry of Freedom,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “When This Cruel War Is Over,” “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” “Johnny Fill Up the Bowl,” “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Johnny Is Gone for a Soldier,” “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” and “Just Before the Battle, Mother” (160–62).

Like their Southern counterparts, Union soldiers were adept at changing the words to songs. “Just Before the Battle, Mother” was sometimes parodied as

Just before the battle, mother,

I was drinking mountain dew,

When I saw the Rebels marching,

To the rear I quickly flew. (Commager 1978, 1:568)

One of the most contentious songs of the Civil War to Southern ears was Henry Clay Work’s “Marching Through Georgia,” which celebrated Sherman’s destructive passage through the South after the sacking of Atlanta. The song became so well known that it was played by the Japanese when they entered Port Arthur, Manchuria, sung by the British in India, and played and sung by Allied forces in World War II (1:570).

Of the war’s artistic output, music (and not poetry or literature) may well have been the most enduring legacy. This is certainly true from a Northern perspective. Paul Johnson notes “how little impact the Civil War made upon millions of people in the North. When Edmund Wilson came to write his book on the conflict, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962), he was astonished by how little there was of it. There were hymn-songs, of course: ‘John Brown’s Body,’ Julia Ward Howe’s ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’ to rally Northern spirits, Daniel Decatur Emmett’s ‘Dixie’ to enthuse the South. . . . It was quite possible to live in the North and have no contact with the struggle whatsoever” (1997, 406).

Johnson surmises that the difference between North and South was “that it would have been far less likely for a Southerner to be unaffected by the war, owing to the relatively larger impact the war had on the South.” Factually, this rings true; except for two forays by Lee (at Antietam in 1862 and Gettysburg in 1863) and Jubal Early’s Washington Raid (1864), the North was free from large-scale invasions by the South. In contrast, the Confederacy was both blockaded and invaded. In particular, Sherman’s march to the sea, in which he essentially waged war against civilians—aspects of which were described by one British writer as “brigandage” (Boatner 1959, 511)—had a profound, demoralizing effect on the South.

The Civil War and Country Music

Peterson and Davis (1975) identify the “Fertile Crescent” of country music as a Southern-based hearth of culture; within this region, interest in the Civil War manifested itself over time in country music. The Civil War’s impact on Southerners helps to explain why songs of the war lingered in their memories long after the conflict ceased, and why they were later recorded by country musicians as early as 1920. “Dixie,” for example, was recorded at least ten times between 1924 and 1936 by Uncle Am Stuart, Doc Roberts and Edgar Boaz, Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers, Earl Johnson, the Kessinger Brothers, Red Foley, and others (Meade, Spottswood, and Meade 2002, 344), including Boxcar Willie (Lecil Martin). Canadian Ray Griff, who performed several times at the Jimmie Rodgers Memorial Festival, also recorded “Dixie” (no date [n.d.]). “Just Before the Battle, Mother” was recorded four times between 1935 and 1945 (462–68), and Marty Robbins recorded it again in 1963. Meade et al. list six pre-1939 versions of “The Vacant Chair,” which Kathy Mattea also recorded more recently on Songs of the Civil War (1991). “Faded Coat of Blue,” one of the most memorable Civil War songs in country music, was recorded by Welby Toomey, Buell Kazee, the Carter Family, and David Miller, Frank Welling, and John McGhee. Bill Clifton (1963), Betsy Rutherford (n.d.), Jay Ungar and Molly Mason (1993), and Suzanne Thomas (1998) have also recorded it.

“Lorena” also persisted from the 1860s to the era of recorded country music: the Blue Ridge Mountain Singers recorded it in 1930. Later, John Hartford (who recorded it at least three times), the Osborne Brothers (1994), Robert and Claudene Nobley (1975), and the bluegrass group East Virginia (n.d.) had versions similar to the original. Johnny Cash (with versions in 1959, 1970, and 1972), Waylon Jennings (1994), and even Australia’s Kevin Shegog (n.d.) sang a later variation of the Civil War favorite. Another plaintive song about a dying soldier, “Write a Letter to My Mother,” was recorded by Charles Nabell, Roy Harvey, Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers (1930, reissued 1998), J.E. Mainer’s Mountaineers (1935, reissued n.d.), and as “Not a Word of That Be Said” by Wade Mainer (1980) and Hazel Dickens, Carol Elizabeth Jones, and Ginny Hawker (1998).

Over the years, country and bluegrass fiddlers have recorded many tunes played during the conflict. For example, Fiddlin’ John Carson and Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers recorded “Hell Broke Loose in Georgia,” a tune that may well have been inspired by Sherman’s capture of Atlanta and his subsequent march through Georgia and South Carolina. “Billy in the Low Ground,” “Arkansas Traveler,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” and other Civil War tunes have been played as instrumentals by country musicians for decades. Russell suggests that old-time bands such as the Skillet Lickers, with repertoires reaffirming Southern attitudes, such as “Run, Nigger Run” and “Dixie,” would have been warmly welcomed in any Southern port of call (1970, 21). More recently, Jim Taylor has recorded at least two thoroughly annotated albums of fiddle tunes that were played during the Civil War.

Country musicians also recorded songs of plantation life, though not all of these were written before, or during, the war. Among these recordings are “Gum Tree Canoe,” “Uncle Ned,” “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground,” “Ella Rhee” (better known as “Sweet Allalee”), “Darling Nellie Gray,” “Poor Old Slave,” “Kitty Wells,” “Year of Jubilo,” “Down in the Cane Brake,” “Those Cruel Slavery Days,” “I’m Going from the Cottonfields,” “Little Log Cabin by the Stream,” and “No More the Moon Shines on Lorena” (Meade, Spottswood, and Meade 2002, 462–68). Because these songs were sung from a Southern perspective, perhaps not surprisingly many of them offer a somewhat sanitized depiction of antebellum plantation life at odds with abolitionist portrayals of slavery. “My Pretty Quadroon” (The Browns, 1960), for example, may well disguise a “massa’s hot intentions towards the estate’s little octoroons” (Russell 1970, 20), although the lyrics focus on “gardens and bowers, and flowers that were always in bloom,” and “flowers that faded too soon.” Similarly, Mac Wiseman’s 1966 recording of “Darling Nellie Gray” only hints of the forced separation of slave couples (a common occurrence in the prewar South). A few songs, however, describe the cruelty of slavery: Fields Ward and His Buck Mountain Band were unequivocally damning in their recording of Ward’s “Those Cruel Slavery Days” (1929), with its references to slaves being sold “for silver and gold” and to “those agonizing cruel slavery days.”

Some of commercial country music’s earliest performers had tangible links with the Civil War. Uncle Dave Macon’s father, John Macon, for example, was a captain in the Thirty-fifth Tennessee Infantry Regiment and fought at Shiloh, Perryville, and Murfreesboro (Wolfe 199...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Civil War in Country Music Tradition
• 2. “Bloody War”: War Songs in Early Country Music
• 3. “There’s a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere”: The Story behind Its Success
• 4. Gene Autry in World War II
• 5. Peace in the Valley: The Development of John Lair’s Enterprises during WWII
• 6. Hayloft Patriotism: The National Barn Dance during World War II
• 7. “Jesus Hits Like an Atom Bomb”: Nuclear Warfare in Country Music, 1944–56
• 8. Purple Hearts, Heartbreak Ridge, and Korean Mud: Pain, Patriotism, and Faith in the 1950–53 “Police Action”
• 9. “Dear Ivan”: Country Music Perspectives on the Soviet Union and the Cold War
• 10. “True Patriot”: Brian Letton Goes to War
• 11. “Alternative” to What? O Brother, September 11, and the Politics of Country Music
• 12. Ulster Loyalism and Country Music, 1969–85
• 13. In Whose Name? Country Artists Speak Out on Gulf War II
• 14. Country Music: A Teaching Tool for Dealing with War
• List of Contributors