Andersonville, vol 3 | Page 7

loving, passionate
loyalty to a wretched cause; songs which are today esteemed and sung
wherever the English language is spoken, by people who have long
since forgotten what burning feelings gave birth to their favorite
melodies.
For a century the bones of both the Pretenders have moldered in alien
soil; the names of James Edward, and Charles Edward, which were
once trumpet blasts to rouse armed men, mean as little to the multitude
of today as those of the Saxon Ethelbert, and Danish Hardicanute, yet
the world goes on singing--and will probably as long as the English
language is spoken--"Wha'll be King but Charlie?" "When Jamie Come
Hame," "Over the Water to Charlie," "Charlie is my Darling," "The
Bonny Blue Bonnets are Over the Border," "Saddle Your Steeds and
Awa," and a myriad others whose infinite tenderness and melody no
modern composer can equal.
Yet these same Scotch and Irish, the same Jacobite English,
transplanted on account of their chronic rebelliousness to the mountains
of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, seem to have lost their
tunefulness, as some fine singing birds do when carried from their

native shores.
The descendants of those who drew swords for James and Charles at
Preston Pans and Culloden dwell to-day in the dales and valleys of the
Alleganies, as their fathers did in the dales and valleys of the
Grampians, but their voices are mute.
As a rule the Southerners are fond of music. They are fond of singing
and listening to old-fashioned ballads, most of which have never been
printed, but handed down from one generation to the other, like the
'Volklieder' of Germany. They sing these with the wild, fervid
impressiveness characteristic of the ballad singing of unlettered people.
Very many play tolerably on the violin and banjo, and occasionally one
is found whose instrumentation may be called good. But above this
hight they never soar. The only musician produced by the South of
whom the rest of the country has ever heard, is Blind Tom, the negro
idiot. No composer, no song writer of any kind has appeared within the
borders of Dixie.
It was a disappointment to me that even the stress of the war, the
passion and fierceness with which the Rebels felt and fought, could not
stimulate any adherent of the Stars and Bars into the production of a
single lyric worthy in the remotest degree of the magnitude of the
struggle, and the depth of the popular feeling. Where two million
Scotch, fighting to restore the fallen fortunes of the worse than
worthless Stuarts, filled the world with immortal music, eleven million
of Southerners, fighting for what they claimed to be individual freedom
and national life, did not produce any original verse, or a bar of music
that the world could recognize as such. This is the fact; and an
undeniable one. Its explanation I must leave to abler analysts than I am.
Searching for peculiar causes we find but two that make the South
differ from the ancestral home of these people. These two were Climate
and Slavery. Climatic effects will not account for the phenomenon,
because we see that the peasantry of the mountains of Spain and the
South of France as ignorant as these people, and dwellers in a still more
enervating atmosphere-are very fertile in musical composition, and
their songs are to the Romanic languages what the Scotch and Irish
ballads are to the English.
Then it must be ascribed to the incubus of Slavery upon the intellect,
which has repressed this as it has all other healthy growths in the South.

Slavery seems to benumb all the faculties except the passions. The fact
that the mountaineers had but few or no slaves, does not seem to be of
importance in the case. They lived under the deadly shadow of the upas
tree, and suffered the consequences of its stunting their development in
all directions, as the ague-smitten inhabitant of the Roman Campana
finds every sense and every muscle clogged by the filtering in of the
insidious miasma. They did not compose songs and music, because
they did not have the intellectual energy for that work.
The negros displayed all the musical creativeness of that section. Their
wonderful prolificness in wild, rude songs, with strangely melodious
airs that burned themselves into the memory, was one of the salient
characteristics of that down-trodden race. Like the Russian serfs, and
the bondmen of all ages and lands, the songs they made and sang all
had an undertone of touching plaintiveness, born of ages of dumb
suffering. The themes were exceedingly simple, and the range of
subjects limited. The joys, and sorrows, hopes and despairs of love's
gratification or disappointment, of struggles for freedom, contests with
malign persons and influences, of rage, hatred, jealousy, revenge, such
as form