“Going Across the Mountain” – Memorial Day, 2018
Introduction â âHear my banjo tell âŚâ
Juneâs installment is a week early so that we might honor another Memorial Day here at MBM. We havenât missed one in the last six years, and weâre not about to start! The same conflict that inspired the original Decoration Day â the American Civil War â gave rise to todayâs featured song. âGoing Across the Mountainâ comes to us from the Great Smokies that straddle the border of North Carolina and Tennessee.
I recently used a lovely performance of this song in my 8th grade history class to start our study of the Civil War. I dedicated it to a member of our staff, my friend, currently deployed overseas with his National Guard unit. As I told my students, the lyrics may be 150 years old but the feelings are something to which any soldier or their loved ones can relate. Here are Anna and Elizabeth some time in late summer, 2014.
Going across the mountain. Oh, fare you well;
Going across the mountain, hear my banjo tell.Got my rations on my back, my powder it is dry.
Iâm a-goinâ across the mountain, Chrissie, donât you cry.Iâm going across the mountain to join the boys in blue.
When the war is over, Iâll come back to you.Iâm going across the mountain if I have to crawl,
Iâll give old Jeffâs men a little of my rifle ball.I expect youâll miss me when Iâm gone, but Iâm going through.
When this war is over, Iâll come back to you.Way before itâs good daylight, if nothing happens to me,
Iâll be way down yonder in old Tennessee.
âIf nothing happens to meâŚâ
The historical context is straightforward. The âboys in blueâ are the Union army and âJeffâs menâ are the Confederates serving their president, Jefferson Davis. âPowderâ and ârifle ballâ of course reference the percussion cap muzzle-loading muskets common to Civil War infantry. However, itâs the universal humanity that makes this song powerful.
The singer lovingly comforts his wife or sweetheart, or perhaps his daughter, âChrissie, donât you cry.â We donât need to know their specific relationship to know the pain of separation. We all relate. Uncertainty and the fear of death are there too. Yet, itâs the hopeful line that has the greatest impact, at least to my ear. âWhen this war is over, Iâll come back to you.â How many soldiers over the ages have said it? How many families today wait for their loved ones, young women and men, to return from duty? How many never make it home?
We donât know if the narrator of the song was a casualty but, to the best of our knowledge, the song survived the Civil War and descended into the 20th century through the family of Frank Proffitt. (Note: Clifton Hicks added a comment to the post below wherein he explores the interesting possibility that the song, or parts of it, originated during the American Revolution. Check it out!)
In any case, Anne and Frank Warner collected the first documented version in 1959 from Proffitt in his native Reese, Watauga County, North Carolina. It may be original to his family, but it almost surely is from that region. In 1962, Proffitt recorded a version of the song for Folk-Legacy, and they released it on the same album that brought âTom Dooleyâ to the ears of many an eager atom-age folk revivalist. Proffitt learned it from his grandfather, according to Pete Seeger.
ââŚmy powder it is dryâŚâ
Anna and Elizabeth recorded their studio version for their eponymous 2015 album. Recently, The New Yorker printed a review of their latest album, The Invisible Comes to Us, that references âGoing Across the Mountainâ as a sort of precursor to that work.
âThe duoâs dĂŠbut album, released in 2016, was a spare collection of Southern folk songs, their harmonies tight and beautiful, backed by LaPrelleâs banjo and Roberts-Gevaltâs clawhammer guitar. On that first effort, one old song ventured north of the Mason-Dixon Line, or almost did: âGoing Cross the Mountainâ tells of a man from the South who goes to fight for the Union. That song turns out to be a preface, in retrospect, for âThe Invisible Comes to Us,â Anna & Elizabethâs sophomore effort, which includes some Southern songs but mostly Northern onesâa kind of surprise for both artists, especially the one from the North.â

Sixteen of this West Virginia motherâs boys fought in the Civil War â fourteen for the Union.
The rest of the review is interesting, if unnecessarily political. I think there is a mistake in viewing the narrator here simply as a âman from the southâ who, presumably, betrays the Confederacy and his people. Large numbers of men throughout the Appalachians went to fight for the Union. The geographic dividing lines between slavery and free labor were far more complicated than many today realize. Simply put, where slavery was less prevalent, secessionist sentiment was muted or absent. This was true much further south than the border states.
Unsurprisingly then, âGoing Across the Mountainâ makes no bones about the narratorâs Unionist sympathy. A bit of digging into the musical legacy of the Civil War in Appalachia, as weâve done here in the past, reveals several such songs. Yet, reading âGoing Across the Mountainâ today as some sort of statement about southerners âdoing the right thingâ misses the mark, at least to my mind. Seeger played it that way, as youâll hear if you check out that whole track. Thatâs not what I hear, though, in either Proffittâs or Anna and Elizabethâs performances.
Maybe we just canât hear it in the post-modern era as someone might have in 1861. So be it. I prefer to hear it as a song for all honorable soldiers and their loved ones. Thatâs why itâs my choice today.
Coda â âIâll come back to youâŚâ
I asked my classes today how many of them have a veteran in their extended family. More than two-thirds raised their hands.
When I think of my friend serving overseas, his wife, daughter, and unborn child, I feel the power of love in my prayers for them. I am deeply grateful, of course, for the sacrifice they make. Yet that sacrifice also evokes anxiety in me. When I feel all mixed up like that, I need the hope and comfort that music provides. Itâs no great revelation that songs like âGoing Across the Mountainâ arise in part in creative response to such feelings. Itâs been that way for a long time, no doubt; perhaps as long as weâve indulged in the sin of war itself.
Iâll leave you with a short playlist of other versions of todayâs song. Thanks for listening and reading today, folks!