What was the most common/widely known tunes?

[Tyler Underwood]

Today as I was working on some projects and listening to my favorite music of the period. It really made me think about how easy it is to turn on the radio and listen to the newest song by whoever your favorite artist may be. You listen and sing along to some old favorites that you have heard so many times that you know the words too them. If your one of those fortunate individuals who is musically inclined, you can go to the music store, buy sheet music and lyrics., or you may also in the privacy of your own home, purchases that Justin Bieber lyrics book that you are too embarrassed to be seen in public with.
Other than church hymns it seems like that’s all the music one might know. How practical was it for working class to attend, theater, and live music shows? Could my ancestors who were farmers from Ohio have been able to afford going? Do you think they would have made the 15 mile trip to the nearest town to watch a performance? I honestly don't think so. Or how about that sheet music, where could someone buy it if they wanted it?
Does anyone have any facts or figures on this subject matter? I’m really curious to hear what everyone has to say.

[Alexander Vasquez]

Re: What was the most common/widely known tunes?

I whistle Beethoven during idle times at events and am partial to "Fur Elise". I rationalize that by figuring that it is a catchy, simple, and popular tune even today and offers a change from the more "common" tunes like Dixie or John Brown's Body.

I hate to speculate, but if the so-called "barn dances" of the past actually existed, then that would seem to be a more local, rural source of "popular music/pop culture knowledge" and your rural ancestors wouldn't have had to travel to the nearest city. The Laura Ingalls Wilder stories (I can't believe I am referring to them) do talk about local rural gatherings where music and dancing was done, but there are questions as to their accuracy so take that for whatever it may be worth. The American Memory website at the Library of Congress has LOADS of sheet music from the 19th century, so it was widely published and distributed at least in urban areas.

As a neat project I sometimes assign my more musically-talented students to research and perform an old piece of music. You get interesting results.


Alexander Vasquez
Company C, 15 IA

[dixieflyer]

Re: What was the most common/widely known tunes?

I always enjoy singing offensive, politically incorrect minstrel tunes. :)

Alexander, FWIW, we used L. I. Wilder's stories in museum work I've done in the past. They're a good civilian source.

[Tyler Underwood]

Re: What was the most common/widely known tunes?

Thats good to know about the Library of Congress. I'm going to check that out next time up that way...Now lets suppose you have the sheet music. If you can't read music you are going to have a very hard time learning the tune of that song.
Warren, I couldnt agree with you more on that one. There is nothing like listening and singing a little Dandy Jim when youv'e had a bad day to lift your spirits and make you feel like "De best lookin n_______ in de county o."

[Sue]

Re: What was the most common/widely known tunes?

I would venture to guess that most mid-19th century Americans were musically literate to some degree. Remember, this was the post Lowell Mason period, and the normal schools offered musical training to their potential teachers who in turn taught it in the public schools. We know this was happening at least in the '50s, but you can find surviving music textbooks, some directed to teachers and others to students, dated much earlier (I have one dated 1832, which has primary counting lessons set to the tune of Yankee Doodle). And anybody who went to church probably also attended a singing-school at one time or another, even in rural areas. Also, don't forget the proliferation of inexpensive printed music at this time--hymn books, instrumental works, song sheets and songsters, political parodies, works for parlor instruments, songs interspersed in the back of ladies' magazines, ten-penny prints, etc. *Somebody* had to buy up all this music, and it wasn't just the city folk.

Minstrelsy was intensely popular and attracted large audiences of working men. Even small towns without an opera house would sponsor traveling minstrel shows as well as traveling circuses, which featured minstrel and other music as part of their repertory as well.

Another factor pointing to a musically literate society is the proliferation of visiting artists and the large crowds they drew. Maybe your ancestors didn't travel to the city to hear Ole Bull or Jenny Lind, but they most likely knew who these people were and hummed some of their signature music as they went through their workday. And they would probably have had to bury themselves under a rock to not hear the pointed political tunes of the reformers such as the Hutchinson Family Singers, who set their texts to such favorites as "Old Dan Tucker" ("Get off the Track! Emancipation!")

What makes the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (not the TV series!) so valuable is that the repertory of tunes mentioned in them can indeed be traced to aural tradition, and I would encourage anyone who is interested to check out Dale Cockerell's great work in this area, available in print and on CD, http://www.laura-ingalls-wilder.com/dale_cockrell.htm.

And when in doubt, look toward the fifers. Fifers at this time were notorious musical thieves who adopted (or adapted) favorite tunes currently in the air to use as marches and for other military duties. If it's in a period fife book, you can be fairly assured that it was a popular tune at one time or another.

Hope this helps.

Susan Cifaldi

[Silas]

Re: What was the most common/widely known tunes?

I hate to sound like the PC police, but using different keys to represent certain letters for offensive words is still using the words. I play Dandy Jim and many other minstrel songs on my banjo. Love Dandy Jim. I've created a few readily printable songsters which have included Dandy Jim and his associates of the day. I only use period terminology in my songsters. That being said, I have also included a caveat at the beginning of them :

Many of the songs in Uncle Coffee's Ethiopian Songster are common, blackface, monstrel songs from the antebellum period. Each retains the original words from the original songs. Some contain particular words which are harsh and offensive to the modern ear. Despite this, the songs have been kept in the original for reasons of authenticity.

What may be appropriate on the march or around the campfire as a Civil War living history is not necessarily appropriate around all campfires. The proper circumstances for these songs to be sung depend upon time, place and manner.

In applying the concept of time, place and manner, this is a public forum. Changing the letters around may fool the swear word software, but it doesn't fool anyone else. It is still using the words in a public forum. Don't do that. The common approach for minstrel singers in public places singing songs like Dandy Jim is to change the words themselves. The usually substituted word for the one chosen is, "feller." It's vague and ambiguous.

Here's a link to the section of my links page which concerns music : http://www.zipcon.net/~silas/links.htm#N_24_ One of my songsters is available there.

[dixieflyer]

Re: What was the most common/widely known tunes?

Tyler and all,
Allow me to clarify me earlier post, which was largely meant somewhat tongue in cheek in thinking it would bring someone a grin. Having been not only a museum LH volunteer, but also employee over the years, I know to gauge my audience and situation. I would never do something offensive to bring heat down on a museum, reenacting/LH group, etc. Being in the woods with one's pards is a whole different matter than being a LH history site frequented by large numbers of the public. I know y'all are more than aware of that, I just wanted to make sure y'all knew I'm not an idiot . . . .at least most of the time.

Now, on to the subject at hand. One of my favorite 'discoveries" in the early nineties was Jim Taylor's series of recordings of period music. They were very much worth it not only for the music, but for the extensive liner notes. Many of the tunes on his CW tapes/CD's are documented in primary sources as being popular tunes that the soldiers enjoyed in camp. I highly recommend both his CW Collection vols. I & II. I don't think his "Sunny South" CD is currently in print right now. Great liner notes. Another is a set of three CD's that Time-Life produced in the 90's on the CW. Very extensive liner notes are included with that one as well. Well worth looking up in my very humble opinion.
In the early nineties I spent two and a half years working on a living history farm set in the 1850's. I learned a great deal from some of my co-workers (now scattered to the four winds at other sites now) regarding mid-19th c. cultures, especially as it pertained to living near rivers as opposed to the isolation of living far inland away from the nineteenth version of an interstate highway. The people I was portraying had much greater exposure to songs, etc. than those living far away from the transportation arteries. Ergo, they may have heard more of the "newer" songs than others may have.
Another thing is, as you brought up, the playing of musical instruments, singing, etc. Making music yourself was your only entertainment, and I would venture to say that a higher percentage of the population knew how to play an instrument than we find in our population now. (What else are you going to do with those evenings?) Add to that the exposure these men got when they enlisted. For most, they had never seen that many people in one place, or lived in such close proximity to that many folks. The cultural exchange would have been rapid and of a great volume I imagine. The learning of new songs, new to them at least, would have been a natural outcome of this exposure.

HTH, FWIW, YMMV,

[Becky Morgan]

Re: What was the most common/widely known tunes?

FWIW--the house I'm sitting in used to be the common place for square dancing, according to my 90-something neighbors who were here a lot as kids. This living room is small, but people managed by parking the fiddler and guitar player in the windows where they wouldn't get danced into. Before this place, the party took place in the house up the road, which had a bigger living room. The fancy families had pianos and girls who could play them, but they were too respectable to let people get rowdy and dance in the house. As far as anyone could remember--and in my childhood, that included people who were almost a hundred and remembered men coming home from the war--there were dances, church music events and, 9f course, summer revivals and camp meetings.
As soon as steamboats started running, anyone within reach of a river could go down and see a show. The respectability of the theater or music involved varied, of course, as did the reaction of local churches to the goings-on. Some were very strict about not dancing or even watching people dance, and some disapproved of any sort of theater unless it portrayed Biblical subjects, so your ancestors may or may not have gone looking. I am woefully ignorant about canal culture and am not sure whether the Ohio canal boats also carried entertainment, but it would surprise me if they didn't. Both steamboats and railroads, if they had one nearby, often gave good rates for group excursions to see this or do that. Steamboat trips were also popular entertainment for church and fraternal groups. (In a postwar tragedy, the badly overloaded Scioto sank with an entire class of young adults from a Wellsville Sunday school aboard.) See what the community hadplanned for the Fourth of July and you might have a hint. By that time in summer, most farmers could get away from the farm for a little while as long as they either got back for milking or hired it out.
The best suggestion I can make is to look up the local newspaper close to where they lived (or you might try one from each political party--it made a huge difference in who advertised where back then!) See what was on offer in the nearest town and see if any of the local ministers were firing off letters to the editor about it. Sheet music was often advertised in the Intelligencer, and I don't reckon other places were much different.

[Tyler Underwood]

Re: What was the most common/widely known tunes?

Mark, please forgive my earlier post. I did not intend, or hope offend anyone. I also want to thank you for the information you provided.
Becky, thank you for the info and the tips of checking out the newspapers. I will defiantly be do that next time I make it home.

[J. Donaldson]

Re: What was the most common/widely known tunes?

While printed sheet music with copyright dates verifiable to our period present the most obvious form of popular musical culture for us to research, I think there's something to be said for low culture music that was passed orally or aurally through generations and tended to be ethnically and regionally specific. I'm pretty sure that if you got half a dozen fiddlers in a room and asked them to play a tune, you'd hear a half dozen variations on a theme, based on how and where they learned the tune, as well as how they played it themselves, dropping or adding a note on personal variance. It's still that way today. Unfortunately, those tunes are the least documentable and open to the most interpretation. The Scots-Irish roots of Appalachian music seem (to me) to be a fertile ground for investigation, but with little electronic or print recording until after the War, it may be nearly impossible for the modern historian to differentiate between variations and find the way those tunes sounded during the 1850s and 1860s.

[dixieflyer]

Re: What was the most common/widely known tunes?

Becky, according to the "hard-shell" Baptist side of my family*, dancing ain't nothing but huggin' to music. ;)

*(On that side I am also only two generations removed from my CW ancestors as well.)

[Alexander Vasquez]

Re: What was the most common/widely known tunes?

Daniel Slosberg, a "Pierre Cruzatte of the Corps of Discovery" historical interpreter/entertainer (and a pretty good one, at that) gave an interview on a Lewis and Clark website where he talked that one of the most popular tunes of the turn of the century 1800s was "Fisher's Hornpipe", and in the interview he mentioned that 1) the difference between a violin and a fiddle is the manner in which they are played and 2) a song like Fisher's Hornpipe would be interpreted differently from fiddler to fiddler and so there would not be any "definitive" version of the song. I'd suppose that would hold true for other works as well, and may likely extend to the mid-century as well.

In regards to the Laura Ingalls Wilder books--there is some discussion about how much of the works are actually hers, are her younger sister's memories, and how much/what exactly was edited by her daughter. I was at a National Endowment for the Humanities class last year and one of the fellow teachers remarked that there is discussion among "Little House" researchers that it may even be that Laura's daughter pressured her mother to write during the Depression as a source of income; the implication being that some sort of "elder abuse" was occuring to get the writing done. This is why I approach them with a bit of caution.

Alexander Vasquez
Co C. 15 IA

[Sue]

Re: What was the most common/widely known tunes?

"In regards to the Laura Ingalls Wilder books--there is some discussion about how much of the works are actually hers, are her younger sister's memories, and how much/what exactly was edited by her daughter. I was at a National Endowment for the Humanities class last year and one of the fellow teachers remarked that there is discussion among "Little House" researchers that it may even be that Laura's daughter pressured her mother to write during the Depression as a source of income; the implication being that some sort of "elder abuse" was occuring to get the writing done. This is why I approach them with a bit of caution."

Sounds like a question for Dale Cockerell, who has devoted many years to studying the Little House books:

http://beyondlittlehouse.com/home/faq-about-laura/

Let us know what he says ;-)

Susan Cifaldi

[Silas]

Re: What was the most common/widely known tunes?

With Laura Elizabeth Ingalls being born on 7 February 1867, I'm wondering about the relevance of her world as it relates to the primary time focus of this board.

[Danny]

Re: What was the most common/widely known tunes?

The same ol' answers again, but doesn't hurt to repeat.

Minstrel fare was popular during CW period, and a good bet authentically because it's well documented in various printed instrument tutors, sheet music, broadsides, and stage venues and posters of the time.

What's missing in the document-only approach, however, are the many songs that were popular via oral tradition. There were dozens that had been in continuous use from before the CW. This includes sea chanties/work/slave/frontier/soldier ditty/old Irish and English ballads/congregational singing/spirituals etc. etc., stuff like "Abel Brown the Sailor," "Roll The Old Chariot Along," "Shenandoah," "Mrs. McGrath" etc. etc. Their documented origins no longer exist, but we know by the content and the way they've survived that they were popular.

Soldiers and their families were real people. It has to be accepted that they interacted via conversations and example as much or more than they did by document.

Dan Wykes