Confederate "Heritage" Month 2020, April 29: Civil War music, sentimental and funny

Some of the popular Civil War songs were sentimental and have a saccharine sound today. Here is Tennessee Ernie Ford singing one of them, Just Before The Battle, Mother

But we may suspect that such a song was more popular back on the homefront than around the campfires on the front lines. This cynical parody of that same song is also a jab at how what sounds like patriotic devotion back home may sound more like cluelessness to soldiers actually in the fight. Sung by Bobby Horton, Just Before the Battle Mother (Parody):

That version has the Yankees as the other side. This version of the same song, sung by Hermes Nye with the title, Farewell Mother, has the "Rebs" on the other side.

The latter is another selection from Songs of the Civil War (1860) from the hardcore folkie label Folkways, which today is part of the Smithsonian Institute.

The liner notes, edited by Irwin Silber, introduce the collection (in a text by Silber) this way:

The Civil War, that great fratricidal conflict which played such a decisive role in shaping our history and our national consciousness, exits no longer in the first- hand memories of living men. The aging, gray-haired veterans, whose grand reunions and garrulous recollections were, for so many decades, living reminders of the Civil War, have all crossed over into Jordan. The memories of the Civil war are now dependent on less fragile material - on histories and biographies, on the printed page and the time-worn photograph , on artists sketches and such minute memorabilia as wartime maps, fading uniforms, medals (some tarnished, some still shining}, bayonets, swords, battle flags, and other material objects, trifling and important, of an age gone by, which remain after human flesh has paid its inevitable price to mortality.

Among our less tangible but no less real keepsakes, however, are the songs of the Civil War - the stirring marching sones and patriotic hymns, the unabashedly sentimental ballads and the comic ditties, the boasting songs and drinking songs and fighting songs and loving songs of America's bloodiest and most significant struggle. And through these songs, an age which is past is brought to life, and we live with the men and women who walked this land of ours a century ago.