For enthusiasts of early banjo
A view of music and musicians in the South.
Okay, give this a long rope. It is an exerpt from the book "This Was Andersonville" by John McElroy of 16th Illinois Cavalry written shortly after the war.
“Another characteristic of the same nature was their amazing lack of musical ability or any kind of tuneful creativeness. Elsewhere, all over the world, people living under similar conditions to the Southerners are exceedingly musical, and we owe the great majority of the sweetest compositions which delight the ear and subdue the senses to unlettered song-makers of the Swiss mountains, the Tyrolese valleys, the Bavarian highlands, and the minstrels of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.”
“Very many play tolerably on the violin and banjo, and occasionally one is found whose instrumentation may be called good. But above this height they never soar. The only musician produced by the South of whom the rest of the country has ever heard is Blind Tom, the Negro idiot. No composer, no song writer of any kind has appeared within the borders of Dixie. It was a disappointment to me that even the stress of the war, the passion and fierceness with which the rebels felt and fought, could not stimulate any adherent of the Stars and Bars into the production of a single lyric worthy in the remotest degree of the magnitude of the struggle, and the depth of the popular feeling.”
“As a matter of fact, it was the Negros who supplied most of the musical creativeness of that section. Their wonderful prolificness in wild, rude songs, with strangely melodious airs that burned themselves into the memory, was one of the salient characteristics of that down-trodden race. Like the Russian serfs, and the bondmen of all ages and lands, the songs they made and sang all had an undertone of touching plaintiveness, born of ages of dumb suffering.”
“Another characteristic of the same nature was their amazing lack of musical ability or any kind of tuneful creativeness. Elsewhere, all over the world, people living under similar conditions to the Southerners are exceedingly musical, and we owe the great majority of the sweetest compositions which delight the ear and subdue the senses to unlettered song-makers of the Swiss mountains, the Tyrolese valleys, the Bavarian highlands, and the minstrels of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.”
“Very many play tolerably on the violin and banjo, and occasionally one is found whose instrumentation may be called good. But above this height they never soar. The only musician produced by the South of whom the rest of the country has ever heard is Blind Tom, the Negro idiot. No composer, no song writer of any kind has appeared within the borders of Dixie. It was a disappointment to me that even the stress of the war, the passion and fierceness with which the rebels felt and fought, could not stimulate any adherent of the Stars and Bars into the production of a single lyric worthy in the remotest degree of the magnitude of the struggle, and the depth of the popular feeling.”
“As a matter of fact, it was the Negros who supplied most of the musical creativeness of that section. Their wonderful prolificness in wild, rude songs, with strangely melodious airs that burned themselves into the memory, was one of the salient characteristics of that down-trodden race. Like the Russian serfs, and the bondmen of all ages and lands, the songs they made and sang all had an undertone of touching plaintiveness, born of ages of dumb suffering.”
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Permalink Reply by John Masciale on
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I guess he's never heard of Moreau Gottschalk, (see http://www.compactdiscoveries.com/CompactDiscoveriesArticles/Gottsc... for a bio). Seriously, if you were a prisoner in Andersonville, would you have much of anything nice to say about your captors?
Here is the forward to War Songs and Poems of the Southern Confederacy (published in 1904).
These songs and poems belong to the Nation. Although our friends at the North will smile at some, wince at others, and even have their blood warmed by one here and there, they must not forget that they were written by their brothers and sisters during a family quarrel when feeling was intense and the fight hot and fast.
It is all over now; we are more united than ever and shall never fall out with each other again.
My object has been to rescue from oblivion, these productions of a people as brave and true as ever lived, and yet within half a century fogetting the past, they have built up their shattered fortunes, and side by side with the men they had once fought, they stood in battle for the defense of our glorious flag.
No North, no South, no East, no West, but one and separable, now and forever. H.M. Wharton
The book is over 400 pages long.
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