When Johnny Comes Marching Home

The story

"When Johnny Comes Marching Home" was written during the American Civil War by the Irish-American bandleader Patrick Gilmore. Its first edition was deposited in the Library of Congress on 26 September 1863, with words and music credited to "Louis Lambert"; the publisher, Henry Tolman & Co. of Boston, kept the copyright. Why Gilmore used a pen name is unclear, though songwriters of the time often did so to give their songs a touch of romantic mystery. He is said to have written it for his sister Annie, who prayed for the safe return of her fiancé, the Union Light Artillery captain John O'Rourke; it is not clear that they were already engaged in 1863, and they married only in 1875.

Gilmore did not claim the tune. In an 1883 article in the Musical Herald he called it "a musical waif" he had heard someone humming early in the war, which he wrote down, dressed up, named and "rhymed into usefulness" for the times. The melody had been printed around 1 July 1863 for the Civil War drinking song "Johnny Fill Up the Bowl", whose sheet music says it was arranged, not composed, by J. Durnal, and an undated slip of Gilmore's words from his own Boston publisher tells singers to use that tune. "Johnny Fill Up the Bowl" was a topical song that soldiers and publishers kept refitting with new words; one satirical version, "For Bales", published in New Orleans in 1864 by A. E. Blackmar, mocked the alleged thieving of some Union soldiers there. The tune has been likened to that of "John Anderson, My Jo", which goes back to about 1630 or earlier, and Jonathan Lighter has suggested a link to the 17th-century ballad "The Three Ravens". The song is often thought to be a rewriting of "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye", but that song was not published until 1867 and first had a different melody.

The song voiced the longing of families for the return of men away at the war, and it was sung on both sides, Union and Confederate. Gilmore's words were printed in 1863 in Erastus Beadle's Beadle's Dime Song Book, No. 15. The song became a hit in England and Ireland as well, where it was eventually rewritten into "Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye". Its tune carried new words for new causes: in the presidential campaign of 1880, "If the Johnnies Get into Power" backed the Republicans James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur against the Democrats Winfield S. Hancock and William H. English, and in 1914 a British version appeared as "When Tommy Comes Marching Home".

It became popular again in the Second World War. Glenn Miller recorded it in 1942 with Tex Beneke, Marion Hutton and The Modernaires, and Guy Lombardo and the Andrews Sisters recorded it the same year, when Morton Gould also set it as "American Salute", a set of variations that became a staple of American orchestral music. In John Ford's western The Horse Soldiers the last line was changed into a promise to "raise hell", and the tune and refrain live on in children's songs such as "The Ants Go Marching", which Robert D. Singleton adapted for the Barney special "Campfire Sing-Along".

What it says

A song of homecoming: a town imagines the day its soldier returns from the war, and the cheering and celebration that will greet him. The mood is brisk and joyful, though it is a hope voiced in wartime, before anyone knows who will come back.

The words