An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 2 | SONG, DANCE, AND HOME MUSIC MAKING 47

date: 1768

performers: Arthur F. Shrader, with David

Robertson, Edward Olsen, and Kenneth Lemly

genre: broadside ballad

meter: duple, but unmeasured in this

performance

form: verse and chorus

Listening Guide 2.1 “The Liberty Song” JOHN DICKINSON

timing section text comments

0:00 verse 1 Come join hand in hand... Solo singer.

0:13 chorus In freedom we’re born... The other voices join in on the unharmonized melody.

0:25 verse 2 Our worthy forefathers... Solo singer.

0:39 chorus In freedom we’re born... All voices.

note The complete song has nine verses (musical sections that repeat with new words each time), each fol-

lowed by an unchanging chorus. In this performance, only two verses are sung.

WHAT TO LISTEN FOR

• alternation of solo verse and unison chorus


• rhythmic freedom of this performance

Listen & Refl ect

1. Sing the quoted lyrics from “Heart of Oak” and the loyalist parody of “The Liberty Song” to the
   melody heard here. Does one set of lyrics seem to fi t the melody better than the others? If so,
   how? And if not, what does that say about music-and-text relationships in these related songs?

Patriotic broadside ballads took their melodies not only from English songs

but also from the vast body of dance music that circulated in Britain and its

American colonies. For instance, “The Irishman’s Epistle to the Offi cers and

Troops at Boston,” which appeared in the Pennsylvania Magazine of May 1775, only

a month after war broke out, was sung to the tune of “Irish Washerwoman.” In

Philadelphia, far removed from the fi ghting, observers could look beyond the

war’s grim side and fi nd humor in an event like the hasty British retreat from

the colonials. In the second stanza, the song’s Irish protagonist taunts the British

Regulars, gleefully rubbing salt into their wounded pride:

How brave you went out with muskets all bright,

And thought to befrighten the folks with the sight;

But when you got there how they powder’d your pums,

And all the way home how they pepper’d your bums,

And is it not, honies, a comical farce,

To be proud in the face, and be shot in the arse?

CD 1.6

172028_02_044-062_r3_ko.indd 47 23/01/13 8:13 PM