Sounds
INSTRUMENT OF WAR
Chapter 1:
A Great and Secret Power
- Spotify Playlist
- Bugle Calls + Drum Beats of the Civil War
- Saturday Night Live Skit
Chapter 2:
Music, Race, Empire
Chapter 3:
Music and Guns Go Hand in Hand
Chapter 4:
The Best-Entertained Soldier in the World
Chapter 5:
The Powers of Song
Chapter 6:
Demythologizing the Rock-and-Roll War
Chapter 7:
Shoot to Thrill
Coda:
Seven Elegies
INSTRUMENT OF WAR
Chapter 1: A Great and Secret Power
SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
The Civil War was fought before the invention of sound recording, but many of the songs and sounds from that era have been recorded subsequently. This Spotify playlist features recordings of some of the patriotic or war-related songs which were popular with Union and Confederate soldiers.
(If you are interested in such music, Spotify has whole albums of it, including The Civil War: Its Music and Its Sounds; Home, Sweet Home: A Civil War Sampler; and multiple recordings by a group of Civil War re-enactors, the Second South Carolina String Band.)
BUGLE CALLS AND DRUM BEATS OF THE CIVIL WAR
The chapter discusses at some length the drum beats and bugle calls that soldiers had to know. Here are a few of them, courtesy of the Gettysburg National Historic Site:
SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE SKIT “CIVIL WAR SOLDIERS”
This Saturday Night Live skit is evidence of the staying power of singing soldiers from the Civil War in American popular culture. It features SNL regulars Jimmy Fallon, Beck Bennett, Alex Moffat, Mikey Day and special guest Harry Styles.
The gag is the anachronism of the lyrics they sing, but the historical reference is on point: soldiers in the Civil War did sing to entertain themselves at night.
