"When Johnny Comes Marching Home"

Sometimes a Song

This week’s Sometimes a Song brings to mind the happier — perhaps the most joyous — memories from my school days, at Hackettstown Elementary School, which then included grades K through 8. From the distance of many a decade, I cannot now remember exactly when I learned our song for this week, but I know that it was there, where our musical education was not neglected, even if we did learn to read music while playing plastic recorders called flutophones! Imagine learning basic musical notation not in a dedicated music class, but in a regular classroom, taught by your third-grade teacher. And in that same school, we had a choir, where I learned that I was “only” a second soprano, much to my annoyance. However, I was not disappointed to be chosen to sing in a quartet at the annual concert, because I could sing harmony with ease. And I loved “My Grandfather’s Clock,” the song we sang in von Trapp style, standing in a line of four, with two leaning one way and two the other on the “tick-tock, tick-tock.” That is what school was like in those days, and believe me, I was never BORED there. When children are given interesting and human things to do and to learn, boredom is just not possible.

Do children still sing in the classroom? I’m not sure. I do know that by the time my own children were small, the public schools were failing to teach the Three R’s as those used to be called. And I began to be aware that school children in general could not sing. This lesson hit me over the head when I went to Girl Scout camp to pick up my daughter at the end of each day. Some flag ceremony still remained, but any effort at singing was disastrous, and always devolved into camp leaders and children alike shouting out the words with nothing close to a musical outcome. I also learned back then that people other than I were noticing that the schools had given up on teaching the time-honored songs of old: patriotic tunes, folk songs, rounds, and generally fun pieces. I won’t bore you with a long list of songs I learned as a school child, but the list WAS long, and it included such as “Three Blind Mice” and “Frere Jacques” in the early grades, “Short’nin’ Bread,” “America” and of course “The Star-Spangled Banner.” At Christmas time we sang traditional carols and “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” In gym class, along with other folk dances, we learned to dance the hora to “Hava Nagila,” which we learned to sing as well.

So somewhere along the line — and it was, I’ll add, a generally known song back then — I learned to sing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Yep, the lyrics to these songs were drilled into my little bean, where they still reside to this day, along with tunes and lyrics to a set of early American presidential campaign songs we also learned in school. The two that I recall best to this day are “Tyler and Tippecanoe” and “Get on the Raft with Taft.” (The former of these two holds a place as the first widely-successful presidential campaign song, and in its day was regarded as the American counterpart to the Marseillaise as a freedom song.) Oh, yes! And we learned national anthems, as well, in school. That’s where I learned to sing the Marseillaise. Why was it important that for the rest of my life I’d be able to sing the campaign song for the 1840 election of William Henry Harrison and John Tyler? Well, because Harrison was “the hero of Tippecanoe, I guess!

All of this is a diversionary tactic on my part to “fun” my way into a well known folk song on both sides of the pond, which came to prominence in the United States in 1863, when the states were definitely not united. I expected my search to turn up that most famous composer, Anonymous, in the credits, but instead I turned up a slight mystery. We do know that the tune with the lyrics “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” was first published by Patrick Gilmore, an Irish immigrant to America who arrived in Boston in 1848. But the rights were retained by the publisher, and the entire song was credited to Louis Lambert, a pseudonym which Gilmore used on a number of songs. Why he used a pseudonym I have not discovered, but it seems clear that the tune for “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” at least, was known in Ireland, set to much more somber lyrics in the song, “Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye.” Perhaps the pseudonym was the publisher’s idea, since the composer of the music was unknown. What we do know is that Gilmore wrote the words while he was serving as a bandmaster as an enlisted soldier for the Union Army, to whom he dedicated the piece. Understandably, and with unintentional irony, the tune became immensely popular with soldiers on both sides of the war and with their dear ones at home, waiting and hoping for their own Johnny to return from battle.

Not a lot is known about Patrick Gilmore’s life in Ireland, but at an early age he heard and fell in love with fife and drum music, so much so that his father hired a well-known bandleader to teach Patrick classical music, and to train him in playing the trumpet. In his lifetime, Patrick held a reputation of the best cornet player in the world. But mostly, he is known for his creation of martial bands, and was immensely popular in his day and a band leader and as an organizer of massive musical events, particularly when the war ended, when he was requested to organize, lead, and perform in concerts in celebration of the peace.

But “band leader” is inadequate to describe Patrick Gilmore. He was the first band arranger to pair brass instruments with woodwinds, and for that reason he’s considered an important forerunner of the Big Band sound. We might call him now an event promoter, but even that is not adequate. When the war ended, President Lincoln asked Gilmore to organize a celebration in New Orleans, and from there he moved on to other cities. Even before the war, his concerts were so large as to require that two separate stadiums be built to hold the massive crowds he attracted — crowds of 60,000 and of 120,000 needed to be seated for these events. His 1855 “Promenade Concert” in Boston was the prototype of what became The Boston Pops. His “Gilmore’s Concert Garden” in New York City was the prototype of what became the venue called Madison Square Garden.

People regarded Patrick Gilmore as the nation’s music director, and as such he performed at eight presidential inaugurations; and at the 1876 centennial celebration in Philadelphia; and at the1886 dedication of the Stature of Liberty. It was Patrick Gilmore, as leader of New York’s 22nd Regiment Band, who began what became the national tradition of celebrating New Year’s Eve at Times Square. He took the Regiment Band on a successful European tour. And it was Gilmore who persuaded the Waltz King, Johann Strauss, to make his only concert tour of the United States. All this, and more, Patrick Gilmore accomplished as an immigrant and naturalized American patriot who devoted his lifetime to bringing uplifting and extraordinary music to his adopted homeland. He predated John Philip Souza by forty years and essentially created the modern military bands prototype for which Souza was a perfect composer and leader into the 20th century.

Can I get three times three for Patrick Gilmore??? Hip Hip, Hoorah! Hip Hip, Hoorah! Hip Hip, Hoorah!

Here is a version of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” in a clever arrangement by the West Point Band, in instrumental format, as Gilmore would have performed it.

Listen above to The Irish Rovers singing “Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye,” a much darker lyric set to the same tune that used of his “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”