John Brown's Body

The story

The tune came from the camp meetings of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, open-air revivals in frontier areas where hymns were learned by ear and changed as they were sung. The hymn "Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us" was sung by African American and white worshippers in Methodist and Baptist camp meetings across the South, and can be traced in print to camp-meeting collections of 1806–1808 in South Carolina, Virginia and Massachusetts; its familiar hallelujah chorus grew out of the oral tradition sometime between 1808 and the 1850s. Some researchers trace the tune further back, to an African American song, a wedding song from Georgia or a British sea shanty, and versions were sung in African American ring shouts, whose call and response may have helped to shape the chorus. It has been suggested that the hymn already carried an anti-slavery meaning for Black Southerners. As the southern camp meetings faded, the tune passed into hymn books and became known in the North; by 1861 Baptists, Mormons, Millerites, the American Sunday School Union and the Sons of Temperance all claimed it.

The new words were about John Brown, the abolitionist executed at Charles Town, Virginia. According to George Kimball's account of 1890, the 2nd Infantry Battalion of the Massachusetts militia, the "Tiger" Battalion, had a jovial Scotsman named John Brown in its ranks, and his comrades teased him that he could not be John Brown, since John Brown was dead. The jokes became bywords and were gradually sung to the tune of "Say, Brothers", until the soldiers settled on lines saying that Brown's soul lived on. Some of the battalion's leaders thought the words coarse and irreverent, but could not replace them. Members of the battalion prepared the verses for publication with the publisher C. S. Hall. The song was played in public, perhaps for the first time, at a flag-raising at Fort Warren near Boston on Sunday 12 May 1861, the month after the Civil War began. Troops sang it as they marched through Boston on 18 July 1861, and a rash of broadsides followed, among them one with music by C. S. Marsh copyrighted on 16 July 1861. Others claimed the tune, among them William Steffe, who said he had written a song for a Philadelphia fire company in 1855 or 1856, and Thomas Brigham Bishop (1835–1905); none of them could have composed a tune printed decades before they were born. As the musicologist Annie J. Randall wrote, many authors, most of them anonymous, gave the tune new words to hail Brown's war on slavery.

The song became popular throughout the Union. In 1861 the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator reported that hundreds of soldiers of the 29th New York Infantry Regiment, stationed at Charles Town, visited the site of Brown's hanging each day to sing. Frederick Douglass, Brown's friend and admirer, wrote in 1874 that Brown had been with the troops throughout the war, in every camp fire, as they marched on to victory and freedom. A Confederate visitor to Andersonville Prison recalled hearing hundreds of Union prisoners, held in squalor and facing death, sing a chorus of self-sacrifice to the tune.

Because many people found the soldiers' words crude, more literary versions were written for the tune. William Weston Patton's was published in the Chicago Tribune on 16 December 1861; Edna Dean Proctor wrote "The President's Proclamation" for the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863; Captain Lindley Miller wrote, or wrote down, the "Song of the First of Arkansas" in 1864, a similar text being attributed to Sojourner Truth; German veterans of the revolutions of 1848–49 serving in the Blenker Division sang their own "Kriegslied". The most famous is Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic", written in November 1861 when a friend asked her for good words for that stirring tune; Kimball suggests that the friend was President Abraham Lincoln.

On 1 May 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina, recently freed African Americans and some white missionaries held a parade of 10,000 people, led by 3,000 Black children singing "John Brown's Body", to honour 257 Union soldiers whose remains they had reburied from a mass grave at a Confederate prison camp. This is considered the first Decoration Day, now Memorial Day. The song travelled far: in 1906 the American consul in Vladivostok, Richard T. Greener, reported Russian soldiers singing it during the Revolution of 1905, and in 1945 it was better known than the Labour Party's own anthem at Labour rallies in Crewe. Pete Seeger's recording of 1959 is widely heard today.

What it says

A marching song that holds that John Brown, though executed, lives on in spirit as the Union army marches against slavery. Its tone mixes soldiers' rough humour with the fervour of a camp-meeting hymn and its rousing chorus.

The words