John Brown's Body

• 1. Introduction

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  "John Brown's Body" began not as a hymn, not as a battle cry, but as a joke at a Scottish soldier's expense. The man's name happened to be John Brown, and his comrades in the 2nd Infantry Battalion of the Massachusetts militia could not resist ribbing him about it. What grew from that teasing became one of the most widely traveled tunes in American history. It inspired a poem by Julia Ward Howe, echoed through a Confederate prison camp, rang out at the first observation of what would become Memorial Day, and eventually gave labor unions one of their defining anthems. How a campfire prank became a living piece of folk tradition is a story about the way music moves through people, rather than the other way around.

• 2. A Tune Without an Author

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  "Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us" had already been circulating for decades before anyone thought to attach John Brown's name to it. The song was first published in print as early as 1806-1808, in camp meeting song collections from South Carolina, Virginia, and Massachusetts. Specialists in nineteenth-century American religious history describe camp meeting music as the creative product of participants who, seized by the spirit of a sermon, would take lines from a preacher's text as a departure point for short, simple melodies. Tunes were either borrowed from existing songs or invented on the spot, sung repeatedly, and reshaped until a stanza emerged that others could memorize quickly.

  By 1861, groups as disparate as Baptists, Mormons, Millerites, the American Sunday School Union, and the Sons of Temperance all claimed "Say Brothers" as their own. In 1858, it appeared in The Union Harp and Revival Chorister, selected and arranged by Charles Dunbar and published in Cincinnati. That same year, in December, a Brooklyn Sunday school published a version called "Brothers, Will You Meet Us" that included the "Glory Hallelujah" chorus. The famous chorus itself had developed out of the oral camp meeting tradition sometime between 1808 and the 1850s.

  Some researchers have suggested the tune's roots go even further back, to an African-American wedding song from Georgia or to a British sea shanty that may have originated as a Swedish drinking song. Anecdotes record versions of "Say, Brothers" performed as part of African American ring shouts, with singing, clapping, stomping, and dancing, possibly giving the extended "Glory hallelujah" chorus the shape it would later carry into battle.

• 3. Soldiers, Jokes, and a Name

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  In 1890, a veteran named George Kimball wrote down his account of how the lyrics were born. His battalion included a jovial Scotsman who happened to share a name with the famous abolitionist executed at Harpers Ferry. When Sergeant John Brown showed up late for a work squad or lagged behind the company line, his comrades greeted him with remarks like "Come, old fellow, you ought to be at it if you are going to help us free the slaves." Then someone would add, in a solemn, drawling tone: "Yes, yes, poor old John Brown is dead; his body lies mouldering in the grave."

  Those sayings became bywords in the unit, and, in a process Kimball described as similar to the spontaneous composition of camp meeting songs, they were gradually set to the tune of "Say, Brothers." The lines that gave everyone the most satisfaction were the ones suggesting that Brown's soul was "marching on" even as his body dissolved in the earth. The battalion sang them over and over with what Kimball called "a great deal of gusto," always adding the "Glory hallelujah" chorus at the end.

  Some battalion leaders felt the words were coarse and irreverent and pushed for more fitting lyrics, but the soldiers ignored them. Members of the battalion, working with publisher C. S. Hall, selected and polished the verses they found acceptable, and may have enlisted a local poet to help. The song received its first public performance at a flag-raising ceremony at Fort Warren, near Boston, on Sunday the 12th of May, 1861. Newspapers reported troops singing it in the streets of Boston on the 18th of July 1861. A broadside with music by C. S. Marsh was copyrighted on the 16th of July 1861.

• 4. Claims and Counterclaims

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  William Steffe, to whom the "Say, Brothers" hymn tune is often attributed in hymnals and folk song collections, told a different story. He said he was asked to write a song around 1855 or 1856 for the Good Will Engine Company of Philadelphia, to be used as a welcome for the visiting Liberty Fire Company of Baltimore. That original verse began "Say, Bummers, Will You Meet Us?" Steffe believed someone else converted that into the hymn "Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us," but he was never able to identify who. Since the "Glory Hallelujah" tune and the "Say, Brothers" text had both been circulating for decades before Steffe was born, he could not have composed either.

  Maine songwriter and Union soldier Thomas Brigham Bishop, who lived from 1835 to 1905, was championed as the song's originator notably by promoter James MacIntyre in a 1916 book and a 1935 interview. Bishop also claimed authorship of "Kitty Wells," "Shoo, Fly Don't Bother Me," and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," and said he played a role in the composition of "Swanee River." The scope of those claims has done little to settle the historical debate.

  As Annie J. Randall wrote, "Multiple authors, most of them anonymous, borrowed the tune from 'Say, Brothers', gave it new texts, and used it to hail Brown's war to abolish the centuries-old practice of slavery in America." No single composer owned this music. Its power came precisely from the fact that it belonged to everyone who sang it.

• 5. The Civil War Years

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  In 1861, the newly formed 29th New York Infantry Regiment was stationed in Charles Town, Virginia, the town where John Brown had been executed. The contemporary abolitionist newspaper The Liberator reported that hundreds of soldiers from the unit visited the site of Brown's hanging daily and sang a refrain calling on heaven's smiles to look kindly on Brown's grave.

  Frederick Douglass, Brown's friend and admirer, wrote in an 1874 newspaper piece that Brown was with the troops throughout the war, seen at every campfire, with soldiers timing their feet to the "stately stepping of Old John Brown as his soul went marching on."

  At Andersonville Prison, which held Union prisoners of war, a visiting Confederate soldier climbed to the sentry-walk and looked over the stockade near sundown on a hot autumn day. He described a scene of squalor and wretchedness he said was unspeakable. As he turned away, he heard song rise from the mass of prisoners. He stopped and listened to what he called "the most remarkable paean of self-sacrifice that ever inspired an army or a people to suffer and achieve for another's sake." The words he heard, which he said never left his memory, included the line "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free."

  Julia Ward Howe wrote her own text to the same tune after a friend asked why she did not write some good words for that stirring melody. The resulting "Battle Hymn of the Republic" was written in November 1861 and published in February 1862. George Kimball suggested that President Abraham Lincoln made the suggestion to Howe, though other sources disagree on that point.

• 6. Beyond the Battlefield

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  On the 1st of May, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, recently freed African-Americans and some white missionaries organized a parade of 10,000 people, led by 3,000 Black children singing "John Brown's Body." The march honored 257 dead Union soldiers whose remains the organizers had re-buried from a mass grave in a Confederate prison camp. That event is considered the first observation of Decoration Day, now known as Memorial Day.

  By 1906, the American consul in Vladivostok, Richard T. Greener, reported that Russian soldiers were singing the song in the context of the 1905 Russian Revolution. In Britain, the tune became familiar to citizens of Crewe at Labour Party rallies during the 1945 General Election, where the John Brown lyrics were reportedly better known than those of The Red Flag, the Labour Party's own official anthem. Elements of the melody were woven into the Königgrätz March of 1866 by Johann Gottfried Piefke.

  The tune was eventually adopted by the Industrial Workers of the World as the foundation for "Solidarity Forever," which became perhaps the most well-known labor-union song in the United States. Sailors adapted it into a capstan shanty used during anchor-raising. World War II American paratroopers set a song called "Blood on the Risers" to the same tune, with a chorus adapted to their own darkly comic circumstances. A German children's song, "Alle Kinder lernen lesen," uses the same melody. In Sri Lanka, adapted versions are sung at cricket matches. A version recorded with Italian lyrics appeared on Milva's 1965 album Canti della libertà, and the following year Bobby Solo recorded it in the original language on the LP Canzoni e storie del west.

• 7. A Living Tradition

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  Pete Seeger, the American folk musician, recorded a version of "John Brown's Body" in 1959 that remains widely circulated. His lyrics differ significantly from earlier versions and include a stanza drawn from the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." The fact that Seeger's version can borrow freely from Howe's 1862 adaptation, which was itself directly inspired by the "John Brown" song, illustrates the recursive nature of the tradition. Each version feeds back into the stream.

  William Weston Patton, an abolitionist and pastor, composed his "New John Brown Song" in October 1861 and published it in the Chicago Tribune on the 16th of December that year. The "Song of the First of Arkansas" was written down by Captain Lindley Miller in 1864, though a similar text titled "The Valiant Soldiers" is also attributed to Sojourner Truth. Edna Dean Proctor wrote "The President's Proclamation" in 1863 to mark the Emancipation Proclamation. Other versions were written for specific military units, including the "Marching song of the 4th Battalion of Rifles, 13th Reg., Massachusetts Volunteers" and a song written for the Blenker Division, composed of German soldiers who had participated in the European revolutions of 1848-49 and then fought for the Union.

  What keeps the song alive is exactly what kept it alive in the camp meeting circuits two centuries ago: its simplicity, its capaciousness, and its willingness to absorb whatever meaning the moment demands. Len Chandler, singing a song called "Move on over" to the tune on Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest television show, demonstrated that the tradition had not stopped with any one generation.