Civil War soldiers added verses to a tune called McClellan’s Retreat until the song became as endless as the World War I soldier-song, Mademoiselle from Armentieres.Ī stronger factor behind the outpouring of music in the Civil War is the fact that the songs of that war are filled not so much with hatred of the enemy as they are with ideals. Why so much music? For one thing, and in that day, hardly anyone was so uninhibited as not to feel that he could write a song.
That averages out to one song for every day of the war. By the time of Appomattox four years later, more than 2,000 melodies had been added to the American heritage. The first song appeared three days after hostilities began. Nothing in our annals comes even close to it. Nothing in American history has produced more music than the Civil War. Originally aired on MaIn part 30 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson talks about the profound effect the Civil War had on our body of music.
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