Civil War Naval Songs:
Recording 19th-Century Historical Ballads

By Dan Milner

Page 1   |   2

Recording historical songs often can require no more effort than searching the Internet for pre-existing sound files, and finding performers who can replicate performances already regarded as seminal. In circumstances when audio files aren’t available, sheet music indicating melody, tempo, and mood can usually be located. But when the body of songs to be recorded is more than a century old and neither sound files nor sheet music exist, the process then becomes more complex, and weighed judgment must be used to ensure that the integrity of the material is not placed in jeopardy merely to expedite the project.

That was largely the challenge two years ago when Smithsonian Folkways asked me to go forward with Civil War Naval Songs (SFW album 40189), an all-new album honoring America’s veterans. The timing was compelling. April 12, 2011 would mark the 150th anniversary of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, the opening volleys of a conflict that took the lives of 620,000 Americans, some two percent of the nation’s population. The resultant recording—13 songs from Union, Confederate, and British sources—is both historical in view, for the lyrics are all period pieces, and historic in nature, for, of the many albums of Civil War material that have been made, this is the first and only one devoted entirely to the war on water. But, because maritime songs from the Civil War are far less numerous than military songs and good nautical lyrics with memorable tunes are scarcer than gold nuggets in the panned-out creeks of the Sierras, song research and selection were of vital importance.

The majority of maritime songs from the Civil War period are about a handful of topics that captivated public attention during the four-year-long conflict: massive naval assaults on strategic points; commerce raiders built to damage the economy of the mercantile-industrial North; ships that maintained or defied the Federal blockade of Southern harbors; close-quarters duels meted out by heavily armed vessels; and the separation
of loved ones.

At the time of the Civil War, the art of song-making in the United States had reached new heights. Folk poets in rural locations around the nation were craftily fitting the American experience into the templates their forefathers had brought with them from the British Isles. Sheet music was enjoying explosive growth in middle-class homes. First published in 1851, “Old Folks at Home,” written by Stephen Foster, America’s first professional composer of popular songs, sold 150,000 copies, 30 times more than any previous sheet music item. Near City Hall in New York City and in other population centers, ballad sheet printers were turning out just-created topical songs to be sold on bustling street corners and sent by mail to rural hamlets that typically received news—even alarming news—at a slower pace. Songs reflecting all three of these paradigms are included in Civil War Naval Songs. Four are sung by Jeff Davis, a graduate of Duke University and a regular during his college days at the Galax, Virginia, fiddler’s conventions. They all come from Confederate sources. Four more are sung by David Coffin, a descendent of Tristram Coffin who settled on Nantucket Island in 1642, and were composed by Northerners. Yet another four, associated with immigrants who were flooding into both the North and South during the mid-19th century, are led by me, together with a ballad printed in Scotland that views America’s Civil War from the perspective of the blockade runners who risked all to bring precious Southern cotton to the starving mill towns of
northern England.

Page 1   |   2