Battle of the Bands

Much more dangerous duties included playing for troops marching into battle and actually performing concerts in forward positions during the fighting. The idea behind this was that the martial and patriotic music which the bands performed would frighten the enemy and rally the soldiers to victory.

Union General Philip H Sheridan paid tribute to the regimental bands when he remarked, “Music has done its share, and more than its share, in winning this war” and before one of his battles he massed all his musicians on the firing line with the order to “play the gayest tunes in the books; play them loud and keep on playing them, and never mind if a bullet goes through a trombone, or even a trombonist, now and then.” On another occasion, General Horace Porter “encountered one of Sheridan’s bands, under heavy fire, playing Nellie Bly as cheerily as if it were furnishing music for a country picnic.”

At Gettysburg itself, survivors of Confederate General George Pickett’s disastrous charge wrote in later years that Confederate regimental bands stationed in the trees played stirring martial airs as they started off across the mile-long field that separated them from their adversaries. Those same bands greeted them with Nearer, My God, To Thee as they streamed back to the safety of their own lines.

Not all bandsmen were allowed to go into battle, however, and when fighting appeared imminent, musicians were often ordered to the rear to assist surgeons and care for the wounded.

The music played by the regimental bands in the Civil War may be divided broadly into three categories: Martial, including marches, quicksteps and patriotic airs; Dance, made up of polkas, waltzes, schottisches, gallops etc; and Popular, featuring sentimental ballads, operatic airs etc. It’s music filled with emotion, spirit, and charm, and soldiers in both armies had their own favourite songs.

Among the Union favourites were The Battle Cry of Freedom, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, John Brown’s Body, Just Before The Battle Mother, Dixie’s Land, Tenting Tonight on the Old Camp Ground, The Vacant Chair, and Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! while Confederate favourites included such songs as The Bonnie Blue Flag, Maryland, My Maryland, Lorena, and a southern version of The Battle Cry of Freedom.

A favourite of both sides was a ballad called Aura Lea which was given new words in the 1950s and became Elvis Presley’s chart-topper Love Me Tender.

Each company in an infantry regiment had a drummer who would play drum beats to call the soldiers into formation. Drums got the soldiers up in the morning, signalled them to report for roll call, sick call and guard duty, and at night to signal lights out or “taps”.

The most important use of drums was on the battlefield where they were used to communicate orders from the commanding officers and to signal troop movement. Drummers were often accompanied by fifers who played a high-pitched instrument, similar to a piccolo, and usually made of rosewood. Cavalry regiments used bugles to sound the different calls in camp and on the march.

Confederate General Robert E. Lee once remarked that without music, there would have been no army, and the music of the regimental bands played a large part in the Civil War, both in the camps and at home. Not only was it a major source of entertainment, it was also a way to give voice to feelings that words alone often could not express.

But there was another, happier, spin-off from the music of the Civil War. When the conflict ended, the market was flooded with surplus military instruments which had in many cases been left lying around, unwanted. These became the essential tools in early New Orleans Jazz, and the Dixieland style would be dominated by the brass instruments which had proved so popular in the marches of the late nineteenth century - and out of the strong came forth sweetness.