In the Civil War period, musical performance was a much bigger and different part of people’s lives than it is today. Today, for most people, it’s background while you’re doing laundry, or streaming through your earpods while you do your 10,000 steps…or it’s the thing you look forward to at the end of the week, seeing a band playing at a pub with a pint and some friends. A reward for wading through the week’s trials.
But back then, music wasn’t recorded. It was played live, all the time. When someone wrote a song, it was literally written down on paper, and you bought the sheet music and played it on your guitar or banjo or in the study on your piano. It was an intimate, personal thing. People sang to unwind and to make guests feel welcome and valued. And when the guest heard a song that was familiar, it brought joy and a connection that created bonds and relationships in a much less safe and protected world than today’s.
It mattered. It does today, too…but not like that. And at that timepeople realized that when they were playing a tune, they had your attention. So they wrote songs to tell stories and support causes and incite people to make change. Many people could write lyrics, but fewer could write music, so you find many songs with the same melodies, telling all kinds of different stories. We know a lot about what we do about that time and about the way the war affected lives because of the music.
We still have music today, of course, but it’s not the tool of the bards anymore. It’s not how we record and convey our lives and feelings anymore. There is so much media and so many ways for people to shake their fists at the gods, or express their love for the girl next door or for sunflowers… music is just another commodity for consumption.
That’s why Bobby Horton is a treasure that we should be valuing as such. He is a virtuoso musician with an encyclopedic knowledge of the culture of that period, and he presented it last weekend at the Gettysburg Majestic Theater, with writer and musician Sean Deitrich, for us to experience.
The performance made me realize just how important music is to our culture and how we define ourselves.
Horton’s performance and arrangements have been used on several Ken Burns documentaries, and his scholarly rigor and enormous musical talent have made him one of the foremost experts on the folk music and culture of the period.
Deitrich is also a brilliant musician, writer, and curator of stories and culture from the Civil War period. He’s a true bard… a humorist and storyteller and musician. His sensibilities, wit, and stories dovetail perfectly with Horton’s mastery of the genre and incredible mental vault of the folk music of the day, North and South.
As part of his three-day residency in the Majestic Theater’s Flex Theater, Horton offered two distinct programs: Songs & Stories of the Civil War, and The Long Steel Rail in America.
The Songs & Stories program created an intimate and comforting setting to sit back and let these two men take you back to the time when stories were told and songs drove hopes and dreams and wishes out into the world to make them come true.
It’s incredible to me that they can speak of this time, and share songs from the north and south, with no “leanings” toward either side, no agenda at all except to share the time and music in a way that makes you understand how important it was. Horton is an Alabama native, and Deitrich’s blog is titled “Sean of the South”, so it wouldn’t be surprising if one were to show up expecting some subtle Lost Cause patchouli lingering in the air… but the artistry, and true wish to share the scenes, is admirable and truly worth an afternoon’s time to experience.
Whatever your perspective, or wherever you’re from, this much can be said: The Civil War was America’s Holocaust. It was the most horrible thing that could ever happen to this country or any other. But like any important historical event, good or bad, it has to be understood and remembered, because that’s how we got here, for better or worse.
Horton and Deitrich’s masterful performance is like taking a deep breath and looking around yourself. Rebel or Yank, we’d all be the better to shut our collective pie hole and listen to “eating Goober Peas”, or “Battle Hymn of the republic”, or “Dixie”, which was, of course, written by a northerner, and was Lincoln’s favorite tune…or “Lorena”, a song from the time so hauntingly beautiful to this day, I named my cat after it.
Many thanks to Horton and Deitrich for sharing their lives’ work, and to the Majestic for bringing it into Gettysburg. Just as we have better bass playing than we deserve in this town, we also have fantastic and varied content in our town theater. We should consume and support it all by the bucketful.
Tom Dudra is a local music nerd and civil war bore. He writes about local music, as well as essays and fiction about the civil war era. He is often found on the battlefield with Grant, his vicious basset war hound.
Wish I could have been there.