Tenting Tonight

The North is finally getting equal time from Columbia Records, whose 1954 album The Confederacy misted eyes from Richmond to Vicksburg, sold an impressive 35,000 copies. The Union, a handsomely turned-out companion album, may lack the other record's lost-cause fascination, and its concluding "hip-hip-hooray" cannot compete with the doomed defiance of The Confederacy's Rebel-yell finale. But The Union's alternately triumphant and melancholy Civil War music, again grouped by Conductor-Composer Richard Bales, stirs gallant ghosts and makes fine listening. The Grand Army starts off to war with a rousing quickstep, soon changes its tune to fit a war for which--as Historian Bruce Catton points out in an album essay--hardly any of the soldiers were prepared. The disillusion of the troops is powerfully clear in the campfire dirge, Tenting Tonight:

We are tired of war on the old Camp

ground

Many are dead and gone . . . Dying tonight, Dying tonight, Dying on the old Camp ground.

With style and flourish Arranger Bales presents The Battle Cry of Freedom, a rallying song to match the South's cap-tossing Bonnie Blue Flag, and the inevitable Battle Hymn of the Republic. Some of the ditties are wryly humorous, like The Invalid Corps, which pokes fun at the era's equivalent of 4-Fs. But most songs hark sentimentally back, like Aura Lea, to languishing sweethearts or, unabashedly, to home and Mom:

Farewell, Mother, you may never Press me to your heart again; But 0, you'll not forget me, Mother, If I'm number'd with the slain.

This may be sheer bathos, but, as Catton points out, such songs were often sung by young soldiers who knew that their chances of seeing home again were poor. And The Union's effective performance (it is scored for soprano and baritone soloists, a combination that evokes the longing of both the women at home and the men in the field) rarely allows sentimentality to get out of hand.

One of The Union's virtues is the seldom-heard Civil War music it saves from obscurity, e.g., Abraham Lincoln's Funeral March, a moving piece by an otherwise unknown composer, William Wolsieffer. The score is dedicated to Composer Bales's grandfather, a Union captain, but at least at one point the suspicion is aroused that Virginia-born Richard Bales has fired one last shot for the Grey: to record the boom of a cannon, Columbia sound engineers had a twelve-pounder touched off at Manassas, the site of two of the North's worst defeats.

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