All qualifications and exceptions aside, though, the central drama communicated to me, via LP collections of Civil War songs in the early 1960’s, was the tragic romance of the Blue-vs.-Gray, brother-against-brother, North-South standoff: the emotional intensity of a (white) house divided. The songs hadn’t been about that, of course. It was the mid-20C, kid-oriented edutainment revival albums that mingled the songs and achieved the effect. USA victory and CSA defeat were thus processed through a framework in which both sides had a strong, cogent moral point of view, evinced by similarity of song style. Rallies like “Battle Cry of Freedom” and “Bonnie Blue Flag,“ parlor weepers like “Lorena” and “Just before the Battle, Mother,” and comedy numbers like “Goober Peas” and “Just before the Battle, Mother (Parody Version)” expressed and spoke to emotions shared across battle lines.
And why not? When the focus is on lonely young soldiers on guard duty, say, or revved up young soldiers in battle, or pissed-off young soldiers razzing superiors, the emotions are naturally going to be authentically similar, across all the lines. And in fact the Civil War songs were often parodied and “answered” and appropriated by the other side.
The interesting issue to me now is what cultural efforts like those LP’s had in mind, when they were shaping kids’ semi-conscious impressions of the nature of a big historical event. Why, in other words, do I know Confederate songs? or for that matter Civil War songs generally? There’s more reminiscence to be done on that question, but for now: it’s not just the Civil War LP’s I’m trying to understand. It’s the way the whole Blue-vs.-Gray romance played into my imaginative life, in the years before, say, the Jefferson Airplane did.
So before I close this stab at the issue, I want to note a historical fact, which David Rieff pointed out during our Twitter exchange. It startled me, and it’s begun to explain a lot. Here it is. From 1957, when I turned two, until 1965, when I turned ten, the US was officially celebrating a Civil War Centennial.
I did not know that at the time. I went on not knowing it, until the other month, when Rieff referred to it. It turns out that he and I and many other American kids growing up in that moment got immersed in the Civil War as a result of national cultural policy.