In Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War, historian Christian McWhirter argues persuasively about the importance of music during this period. The book is timely because of renewed scholarly and public interest in the War, as Americans continue to observe the Sesquicentennial of that seminal conflict. An outgrowth of McWhirter's dissertation,Footnote ¹ the book is a fairly comprehensive examination of the topic, approached from the point of view of a historian. His sources include letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper reports, periodical articles and sheet music, and the bibliography suggests a thorough grounding in secondary sources in the fields of history and (to a somewhat lesser extent) Americanist musicology. He covers the gamut of contexts, starting with an overview chapter on popular music of the period, discussing the most prevalent patriotic tunes in separate chapters for North and South, and describing the uses to which music was put both on the home front (dance, piano, song) and in camp and battle (field music; music for marching, entertainment and morale). There are chapters on the music of African Americans and on the uses to which music was put at the end of the war; the book concludes with a discussion of the revival and legacy of Civil War music (including its prominent place in late nineteenth-century soldiers’ reunions, its use in the creation and promotion of the Lost Cause, and – in the twentieth century – its role on the campuses of colleges and universities in the South).

Much of the popular music of this period – like popular music today – was song. Unlike popular music today, however, many of these mid-nineteenth-century songs were re-interpreted and reused in different contexts, by different performers (vocalists and instrumentalists; professionals and amateurs) and for various audiences throughout the War. On the home front, a song could be used to convey information (about a particular battle or a particular person), lament the loss of a loved one, express contempt for the enemy, or serve as a rousing source of patriotic fervour. Americans danced to arrangements of popular songs or to instrumental pieces named for familiar individuals (‘General McClellan's Polka’), sang hymns, played variations on tunes like ‘John Brown's Body’ or ‘Dixie’, and created new (generally partisan) lyrics for the melodies of songs popular on the other side. The lives of soldiers were similarly full of music: field musicians (fife or bugle and drum) regulated the minutiae of daily camp life, and brass bands helped soldiers to endure long and tedious marches, inspired them as they went into battle, or helped to maintain morale by playing concerts in camp. Soldiers also amused themselves by playing their own instruments, learning new music from sheet music or songsters sent from home, listening to performances both amateur and professional, dancing to fiddle music, or singing – hymns, ribald parodies or songs to remind themselves of home and loved ones. Musical styles introduced by enslaved or freed Africans or African-Americans (through spirituals or even blackface minstrelsy) increasingly became part of the American soundscape, as did the musical idioms of Irish jigs and fiddle music (which McWhirter mentions but does not elaborate upon). The wealth of first-person information or anecdotes that McWhirter has gathered from letters, diaries and memoirs brings his story wonderfully alive and keeps the narrative moving forward despite the unavoidable repetition of repertory.

The major problem with the book – from a musicological point of view – is the author's relative unfamiliarity with American music history, and his reluctance to discuss the music itself. The former issue manifests itself in two ways: the musical context for some of McWhirter's observations is frequently thin, and some of his assertions are erroneous. One good example of the former is his discussion of ‘battle music’ – compositions intended for home consumption that were devoted, as McWhirter puts it, ‘to portraying the sounds and emotions of battle scenes’ (p. 86). McWhirter notes that this type of composition was popular in ‘the early days of American sheet music’ (a rather ambiguous description) but seems unaware that so-called ‘battle pieces’ constituted an entire subset of piano compositions in Europe and America as early as the mid-eighteenth century. Franz Kotzwara's ‘The Battle of Prague’ (1757) was popular in the United States well into the Civil War period; even more apropos (because of its author) is ‘The Battle of Trenton’ (1797), written by James Hewitt, the patriarch of a Boston musical family that included John Hill Hewitt (‘The Bard of the Confederacy’) who – as composer of ‘All Quiet Along the Potomac, Tonight’ – is mentioned prominently in McWhirter's book. The specific examples are not as important as the reality that such descriptive pieces would have been very familiar to Americans at mid-century. There are other, similar examples of inadequate contexts for the information McWhirter provides, which leaves the reader with an incorrect impression that the musical activity about which he writes was somehow unique to this period. The most prominent example of an error resulting from unfamiliarity with American-music scholarship is McWhirter's assertion of ‘a remarkable loss of interest in what critics termed “art” or “operatic” music – commonly called classical music today’, which is incorrect on several fronts and furthermore perpetuates a number of common misconceptions (p. 28). First, there was certainly a brief hiatus in the realm of American entertainment (including concert and theatre performances) during the first year of the war, as the general sense of tension and uncertainty both North and South distracted audiences. But after the first Battle of Manassas (July 1861) both sides reluctantly acknowledged that the War was not going to be a brief affair, and subsequently life (especially in the North) settled down, and people (including entertainers) resumed normal activities. Second, few critics used the term ‘art’ music in the 1850s or 1860s, and operatic music of the time was unquestionably not what we call ‘classical music today’. Opera, in fact, was an important part of the popular stage all over the United States in the antebellum period, and this music permeated the American soundscape before, during, and after the Civil War. Americans danced to operatic music; soldiers marched to arrangements of the catchiest tunes from popular operas; and sheet music versions of operatic potpourris and piano/vocal arrangements of arias were standard fare in the parlours of Americans both North and South. The inaccuracy of this statement (and several subsequent pages of discussion) is rather surprising for two reasons: in the last 20 years musicological scholarship on the popularity of opera in antebellum America has completely debunked the misconception that McWhirter suggests; furthermore, an error of this significance is uncharacteristic of the generally meticulous level of scholarship in this book.Footnote ²

The author's reluctance to discuss the music (in a book ostensibly about music) is a more serious problem; a more appropriate subtitle might have been ‘The Power and Popularity of Musical Lyrics in the Civil War’. In his introductory chapter, McWhirter throws a two-sentence bone to those of us interested in the actual sound of the music, suggesting that ‘the musical elements’ of popularity are ‘more difficult to determine’, and pointing out that a ‘catchy tune’ and a ‘good marching rhythm’ contributed to a song's success. This is the extent of his musical discussion and he subsequently lapses back into the more comfortable territory of textual analysis (p. 18). This avoidance of any kind of engagement with the music represents a not-uncommon reluctance by many scholars whose disciplinary home is outside of music studies; such scholars apparently believe that music itself is somehow mysterious and requires special training to understand. But this book, for the most part, is about popular songs that regular people loved and sang, many of which are still known today. The musical appeal of these songs is not complicated, nor are their structures any more difficult to understand than are basic poetic forms. Take George Frederick Root's ‘The Battle Cry of Freedom’, for example. Although McWhirter discusses both the lyrics and the reception history of this song, he does not mention the music at all – despite the fact that the song's musical appeal is actually quite easy to explain in non-technical terms.

The melody of this song is simple, with a catchy, fast, and march-like beat; it is – like the tunes of most popular songs – repetitive. The first two lines introduce the melody, which climbs to its highest point for the word ‘freedom’; this emphasis is underlined by accenting the first syllable of the word, thereby duplicating in the music its natural rhythm. Lines three and four repeat the music of lines one and two, but with a slight change: this time the melody ends more conclusively (creating an antecedent/consequent structure). For the chorus, Root shifts gears significantly, starting with a note that is considerably higher than the last note of the verse, and culminating on the highest pitch of the song for the word ‘forever!’ This clearly emphasizes the importance of the declamatory statement ‘the Union forever!’ The melodic snippet is immediately repeated for the exclamation ‘hurrah, boys, hurrah!’ – then the whole thing is repeated again (driving home the meaning) to the text ‘down with the traitors, up with the stars!’ in another antecedent/consequent pair. The last two lines of the chorus duplicate the melody for lines three and four of the verse, which brings us (musically speaking) full circle, resulting in a structure that is essentially AABA, with each letter representing the music for two lines of text. An understanding of this simple structure helps to explain the power of the music: Root's tune is catchy and repetitive (which makes it easy to remember); he furthermore emphasizes important words (‘freedom’) and sentiments (‘the Union forever!’) by using pitch and rhythmic stress to draw attention to them.

McWhirter mentions hundreds of songs in his book, but logically focuses on the most important or best known from the period. A close description of the music of more than a handful of these songs would have been completely unnecessary, for many popular songs are constructed in a similar fashion – with repetition and deliberate emphasis to highlight particular sentiments. Descriptions of several of the most important songs (many of which are still familiar today), however, would have helped the reader to understand better the power of the music (in addition to the lyrics); it would also have introduced to readers unfamiliar with thinking about music some of the simpler (but perfectly adequate) techniques for how to listen to and understand it. Observations of this nature are not limited to musically trained scholars; anyone who can sing and who is willing to pay attention to what is happening in the music can understand it on this level. Since this is a book geared to the history market, providing notation for any of the songs was probably out of the question. But recordings on a companion webpage would be a wonderful expansion of the content of this book, especially for readers who are unfamiliar with particular songs. Barring that, readers can easily resort to YouTube to listen to performances of songs with which they are unfamiliar.

For those interested in teaching a course on music of the Civil War, this book works well when coupled with a more music-specific text like Bruce Kelley and Mark Snell's collection of essays, Bugle Resounding: Music and Musicians of the Civil War Era (which, strangely, is missing from McWhirter's bibliography).Footnote ³ In general, McWhirter's book should be a welcome addition to those interested in the American Civil War; the insights he provides about the ubiquity of music during this period will be a revelation to many. His anecdotal information from primary documents creates a rich and valuable context for the reception of music during this important period.