Skip to main content

Songs of the Civil War

By


Funny what you find in the Wall Street Journal.  Surprisingly, it was the most in-depth review I was able to find for this new collection of music, Divided and United: The Songs of the Civil War.    There's also this piece on All Things Considered.

It seems that Randall Poster, the producer of the 2-CD set, was trying to strike a balance between the two sides of the war, drawing on both Union and Confederate marching songs and ballads.  He's drawn an impressive range of musicians to the music, allowing each to pretty much arrange their own pieces.  Poster has done great work before, so I'm really looking forward to this set.

You get everyone from T-Bone Burnett, who has arranged two folk soundtracks for the Coen Brothers, to Loretta Lynn, the undisputed Queen of Nashville.  In between you get some earthy renditions from Steve Earle, best known for his work on the television series Treme these days, to the Carolina Chocolate Drops, one of my favorite contemporary folk bands.


Not so long ago Bob Dylan came under fire for borrowing lyrics from Henry Timrod, a Civil War soldier, for his album Modern Times..  Dylan had long been known for scouring archives for earthy American lyrics, noted Sean Wilentz, who has also written the liner notes for this Civil War collection.

Some critics have questioned the seeming neutrality of the box set.  Poster apparently didn't want to take sides, letting the songs speak for themselves, which in this case is the way it should be.  After all, Dan Emmett's Dixie is a far more gut-wrenching song than The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and was a favorite of Lincoln.

Hopefully, an album like this will help popularize the music, which is still be played by bands like The 2nd South Carolina String Band around the country.  I don't think you have to be a Civil War buff to appreciate this music.

Comments

  1. BrendonFebruary 2, 2014 at 2:03 PM

    This is a brilliant compilation of songs to relive the past on what it was.
    expatriate tax services

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more