An Introduction to America’s Music

160 PART 1 | FROM COLONIZATION THROUGH THE CIVIL WAR

raising their voices in ecstatic, comradely shouts,

soldiers sing in four-part harmony about war

weariness. Although the song begins in a jaunty

march tempo, that mood gradually loses steam,

and the fi nal lines are sung to rolled, sustained

piano chords. Imagination combines with the

idiom of the sentimental song to create a mood

of numb resignation: an authentic response to

the Civil War.

Testifying to the war’s mindless brutality, a

Rhode Island volunteer recalled what happened

when several Union soldiers entered the house

of a Confederate family in Fredericksburg, Vir-

ginia, and listened as a private played “really

fi ne music” on the piano. “As he ceases playing,

another says, ‘Did you ever see me play?’ and,

seizing his rifl e, he brings it down full force

upon the keyboard, smashing it to splinters.”

That action signaled the soldiers to go on a ram-

page, destroying the remaining furniture in the

house. It was in response to incidents like this

one, as well as to battles in the fi eld, that a song

like “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground” explored

the gap between the heroic and the sentimental,

pondered what war could lead decent men to do,

and thus reached a level of understanding that

neither standard approach could manage.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND REVIEW

1. W hat problems may arise when we use minstrelsy to study nineteenth-
   century African American culture?


2. How did changing gender roles affect the nineteenth-century music
   industry?


3. What are some present-day examples of the use of music to effect social
   change? How are these examples similar to or different from the songs of
   the Hutchinson family or Civil War songs?


4. Looking back to the time line at the beginning of Part 1, which of these events
   had you heard of before reading the ensuing chapters? What can you con-
   nect in some way to your own musical life?

FURTHER READING

Cockrell, Dale. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Finson, Jon W. The Voices That Are Gone: Themes in Nineteenth-Century American Popular Song.

New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

K The cover of Will S.

Hays’s “The Drummer

Boy of Shiloh” (1863)

pictures the fi nal prayer of a

wounded noncombatant on

the brink of death.

172028_06_132-161_r3_ko.indd 160 23/01/13 8:19 PM