CHAPTER 6 | SONGS OF SOCIAL REFORM AND WAR 159
What made “Dixie” a Southern favorite? Why would white people fi ghting to
preserve slavery express their solidarity in the comic dialect of a minstrel show
slave? And why would a song without standard patriotic trappings command
such allegiance? While there are no clear answers to these questions, it does
seem that Emmett’s song offered a myth of the South so inviting that Southern-
ers wholeheartedly embraced it.
The words and images of “Dixie” picture the South as a place to love, support-
ing that view with homey details. The tune, however, is probably most responsi-
ble for the song’s electric appeal. Neither a march nor a hymn, “Dixie” is a dance
written to accompany the jaunty strut of a minstrel show walkaround, where
performers cavorted in what was taken to be the manner of Southern planta-
tion hands. W hen combined w ith its words, the tune kindles the kind of enthusi-
asm that has long made Southerners want to hoot and holler, wave banners, and
throw hats in the air. The day after the South’s military surrender in April 1865,
President Abraham Lincoln was serenaded at the W hite House by jubilant citi-
zens and several bands. After bantering with the crowd, Lincoln asked the bands
to play “Dixie” because the North had recaptured it, and besides, he said, it was
“one of the best tunes I have ever heard.” But “Dixie” was never included in the
North’s spoils of war. By 1865 it was so fi rmly linked to the South and the mood of
defi ance that lingered long after the Confederate army surrendered that it could
not be reclaimed by the nation as a whole.
Rather than centering on inspiration, patriotism, and revenge, many songs
took the human tragedy of the Civil War as their theme. Some were set on the
battlefi eld. Others dwelled on the feelings of those who remained at home. One
of the most popular, Henry Tucker and Charles C. Saw yer’s “Weeping, Sad and
Lonely” (1862), is sung by the beloved of a Northern soldier who is away at the
front. She addresses him as if in a letter:Dearest love, do you remember
W hen we last did meet,
How you told me that you loved me,
Kneeling at my feet?
Oh! how proud you stood before me,
In your suit of blue,
W hen you vow’d to me and country,
Ever to be true.Weeping, sad and lonely
Hopes and fears, how vain (yet praying)
W hen this cruel war is over,
Praying! that we meet again.The singer goes on to confess that “many cruel fancies” haunt her. She imagines
her soldier wounded, fearing that no one will comfort him. In the last verse,
however, she decides that, fi ghting in a noble cause, he will receive the protec-
tion of angels. The perennial themes of romantic separation and patriotism are
here brought together in a single parlor song.
Few songs of the Civil War try to deal with the connection between patriotic
glory and the price that soldiers pursuing it are asked to pay. But one exception,
“Tenting on the Old Camp Ground” by Walter Kittredge, looks beyond the stan-
da rd la ng uage of heroism. T he center of g rav it y is t he ref ra i n, where, rat her t ha n“Weeping, Sad and
Lonely”“Tenting on the Old
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