British writer and musician John Phillpott picks up his metaphorical pack and musket and marches along the musical trail of British and American soldiers who followed their deadly calling with a song on their lips…
During the late summer of last year, my play The Female Warrior – after several rewrites – was finally staged, bringing to a successful conclusion a new and creative episode of my writing life.
The Female Warrior tells the story of Hannah Snell, a woman born around the middle of the 18th century in Worcester, England. So that she could follow her soldier husband who had been posted abroad, she disguised herself as a man and joined the ranks of the British Army.
She was soon plunged into the violent martial environment of the period, surviving not only the brutal punishments of those days, but also several battles with the French, Britain’s main foe at that time.
My story was punctuated with the actors performing several folk songs with a military theme. And it was this that set me on the path of discovering more about the songs and tunes that soldiers down the ages – on both sides of the Atlantic – would have known and sung as they marched to meet their own destinies on the bloody fields of death and dubious glory…
One of the best-loved and most familiar songs on both sides of The Pond is based on a traditional Irish melody titled An Spailpin Fanach, meaning ‘The Wandering Labourer’.
The Girl I Left Behind, also known as The Girl I Left Behind Me, is also said to be an English folk song dating back to the 16th century Elizabethan era. It is said to have been played when soldiers left for war, or a naval vessel set sail.
According to other sources, the song originated in 1758 when English admirals Hawke and Rodney were observing the French fleet. The first printed text of the song appeared in Dublin in 1791.
A popular tune with several variations, The Girl I Left Behind Me may have been imported into America around 1650 as Brighton Camp. Fans of western film epics will also know this tune from legendary director John Ford’s 1940s movies starring such luminaries as the late John Wayne.
And the tune was also revived in Stanley Kubrick’s much-celebrated 1970s film Barry Lyndon, which featured the late actor, Ryan O’Neal.
Also receiving an airing in Barry Lyndon is The British Grenadiers, a rousing and traditional marching song of British and Commonwealth army regiments whose badge of identification features a grenade, the tune of which dates from the 17th century.
The exact origins of the melody are disputed but generally date to the early part of that century. It appears in John Playford’s 1728 collection of dance tunes as The New Bath, while Victorian musicologist William Chappell also suggested links to a 1622 work called Sir Edward Nowell’s Delight.
The debate is best summarised by the composer Ernest Walker in 1907, who described the melody as “three centuries’ evolution of an Elizabethan tune”.
Another song of Irish lineage is Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye, which tells the story of a maimed soldier returning home from the wars and the shock and dismay felt by his girlfriend or wife at the sight of her loved one’s physical condition.
The tune is almost identical to that of When Johnny Comes Marching Home, a song well-known in both Britain and the United States. This, however, has a more celebratory tone, the emphasis being on the notion of the triumphant, returning hero.
The British soldier’s songs, like his conversation, tended to be ribald, bawdy, cynical, except when he sang about home or about the death of a comrade, and then he was frankly sentimental.
There are few of his songs, however, which could be called patriotic – he leaves the making of such songs to those who get paid for it. The regimental sergeant-major’s nose is far more likely to become the subject for a soldier’s song than the outcome of this or that military campaign.
The Duke of Wellington was known to be a strict disciplinarian, yet this didn’t get in the way of him being referred to as ‘Old Nosey’ by the rank and file. Though not in his presence, of course.
The soldier instinctively distrusted the sonorous phrases and noble sentiments manufactured by professional whippers-up of patriotic fervour. The villains of the soldiers’ songs were not the military enemy, rather the army itself, and those who appeared to run it.
Through songs, the army private mocked regulations and raised a loud laugh against the spit-and-polish of army procedure.
Nevertheless, some songs were laments for the young man who had, perhaps through force of circumstance, enlisted. One example is Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier, once again an Irish folk song. The lyrics hint at the sacrifices that men and women make in going off to war.
This song was popular throughout the American Revolutionary War. Although its meaning is known, its history is not. Peter, Paul and Mary used the first and third verses of the song in the arranged song Gone the Rainbow, from their second album Moving (1963).
In 1996, British folk singer John Tams sang Johnny is Gone for a Soldier on Over the Hills and Far Away: The Music of Sharpe. This song is based on Siúil a Rún, which dates to the 1688 Irish rebellion against England that was quelled by the English King William of Orange.
Over the Hills and Far Away is a traditional English song, dating back to at least the late 17th century. The words have changed over the years, the tune being provided with another set of lyrics for the British TV series Sharpe in the 1990s.
The first conflict of the modern period to have songs and tunes specifically composed to partially reflect the reality – and accompany it – was the American Civil War of 1861-65.
In the camps of both North and South, regimental bands regularly inspired, amused, and consoled soldiers who daily faced the threat of death, both from disease and the bullets and cannon shot of the enemy, whom they saw all too clearly in the close-quarter combat of the era.
Far from their homes, music provided a diversion from both loneliness and terror. On the march and in battle, it infused the men with a spirit of élan and commitment to their cause.
Field musicians included the fife-and-drum corps with the marching units and the buglers that accompanied both the cavalry and the infantry. These musicians marked the activities of daily wartime life, including wake up, lights-out, roll call, and drills.
The music also helped organise the movement of the troops, and even conveyed combat orders to soldiers, who were trained to recognise these commands. Although the minimum age for enlisting soldiers was 18, boys as young as aged 12 were allowed to enlist as musicians.
Camped for the night, soldiers enjoyed precious downtime playing cards, writing letters, and, of course, making music. They used instruments brought from home or crafted while on duty, like fiddles, guitars, fifes, drums, and bones (a rhythm instrument made from animal rib and leg bones). Soldiers who didn’t play instruments joined in singing and dancing.
The most popular song of the Northern armies was The Battle Cry of Freedom, written by George Root in 1862 in response to President Abraham Lincoln’s call for 300,000 additional troops.
The song helped rally much-needed men. It also played a vital role on the battlefield, aiding soldiers to summon pride and courage during increasingly desperate battles.
Not always outflanked, or indeed outdone, the Confederate soldiers had a wealth of material to draw from. Next to Dixie’s Land, perhaps no other song was as well loved by the Confederate soldier as The Bonnie Blue Flag.
Written by Harry Macarthy (1834-1888) and sung to the old Irish tune The Irish Jaunting Car, the song lays out the order of secession of the States that went on to form the Confederacy.
Just Before the Battle, Mother also written by George Root (1820-1895) was popular during the Civil War. It was an unashamedly sentimental song that perhaps wrenched, rather than merely tugged, at the heartstrings of the listener.
Just before the battle, Mother, I am thinking most of you,
While upon the field we’re watching with the enemy in view,
Comrades brave are round me lying fill’d with tho’ts of home and God;
For well they know that on the morrow some will sleep beneath the sod.
In stark contrast was the South’s I’m a Good Ol’ Rebel, also called The Good Old Rebel, a pro-Confederate and song of defiance commonly attributed to a Major James Innes Randolph.
It was initially created by Randolph as a poem, before evolving into an oral folk song, and was only published in definitive written form in 1914. The poem and song became universally known among Southerners during the Reconstruction period following the capitulation of the Confederate States at the end of the war.
It has been claimed – though this is not universally accepted – that Major Randoph was a Virginian who served under General J E B Stuart, one of the Confederacy’s most trusted generals. As such findings cannot be confirmed, they are not officially recognised by the Library of Congress.
I’m A Good Old Rebel was memorably arranged by Ry Cooder for The Long Riders movie soundtrack. Cooder did the music for the entire movie. The Long Riders album won Best Music award in 1980 from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards.
Moving forward barely half a century later, the song best-known to British soldiers during the First World War was without doubt Jack Judge’s It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary.
Reputed to have been written because of a wager, it was a minor Music Hall success for Judge until Britain declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914, when it was adopted by the men of the British Expeditionary Force and its undying fame assured.
The tune was taken from an old Irish folk song, which goes a long way to explain why Judge quickly composed the piece to meet the terms of the bet.
John Thomas Judge was born at Oldbury, in the English West Midlands in 1872, and given the usual family nickname of ‘Jack’. He came from humble beginnings in the Irish community of the town, working at an iron foundry, taking over the family fish business, writing songs and verses, becoming a popular music-hall entertainer for a decade in his forties, and achieving lasting recognition for writing arguably what became the best-loved marching song of the First World War.
Fast-forwarding once again a couple of decades, and we encounter the immortal Lili Marlene, the most popular song of The Second World War with both German and British forces.
Based on a German poem, the song was recorded in English and German. The verses were set to music in 1938 and was a hit with troops in both the German Afrika Korps and the British soldiers of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army.
Down the ages, soldiers have mortgaged their lives to their country’s cause. Those not of a military persuasion can only guess at the emotional cost of such a commitment, not to say the physical demands made upon ordinary men – and these days, women too – prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.
Whether it was the British redcoat of centuries past ‘taking the shilling’, or the raw recruit whose future fate lay on the bloody fields of Antietam or Gettysburg, music might not have altered their personal destinies, but it certainly provided a soundtrack that can still be heard to this day.
And I’d like to think that my stage dramatisation last year of the life of Hannah Snell – The Female Warrior – in some small way adds to the eternal folk process that keeps all of us in contact with those who went before.
(headline image: Yankee Doodle – Spirit of ’76 Fife & Drums Revolutionary War – New Colonial American Poster)
Author: John Philpott
Author and journalist John Phillpott has written for many newspapers and magazines during a career that spans more than 50 years. His latest book Go and Make the Tea, Boy! is a memoir of his days as a young reporter.