Thomas Hart Benton – Morning Train, aka Soldier’s Farewell – Lithograph, 1943

Introduction – “Hear my banjo tell …”

June’s installment is a week early so that we might honor another Memorial Day here at MBM.  We haven’t missed one in the last six years, and we’re not about to start!  The same conflict that inspired the original Decoration Day – the American Civil War – gave rise to today’s featured song.  “Going Across the Mountain” 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.
I’m a-goin’ across the mountain, Chrissie, don’t you cry.

I’m going across the mountain to join the boys in blue.
When the war is over, I’ll come back to you.

I’m going across the mountain if I have to crawl,
I’ll give old Jeff’s men a little of my rifle ball.

I expect you’ll miss me when I’m gone, but I’m going through.
When this war is over, I’ll come back to you.

Way before it’s good daylight, if nothing happens to me,
I’ll be way down yonder in old Tennessee.

“If nothing happens to me…”

The historical context is straightforward. The “boys in blue” are the Union army and “Jeff’s men” are the Confederates serving their president, Jefferson Davis.  “Powder” and “rifle ball” of course reference the percussion cap muzzle-loading muskets common to Civil War infantry.  However, it’s the universal humanity that makes this song powerful.

The singer lovingly comforts his wife or sweetheart, or perhaps his daughter, “Chrissie, don’t you cry.”  We don’t 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, it’s the hopeful line that has the greatest impact, at least to my ear.  “When this war is over, I’ll come back to you.”  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 don’t 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 “Tom Dooley” to the ears of many an eager atom-age folk revivalist.  Proffitt learned it from his grandfather, according to Pete Seeger.

“…my powder it is dry…”

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 “Going Across the Mountain” as a sort of precursor to that work.

“The duo’s début album, released in 2016, was a spare collection of Southern folk songs, their harmonies tight and beautiful, backed by LaPrelle’s banjo and Roberts-Gevalt’s clawhammer guitar. On that first effort, one old song ventured north of the Mason-Dixon Line, or almost did: “Going Cross the Mountain” 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 “The Invisible Comes to Us,” Anna & Elizabeth’s sophomore effort, which includes some Southern songs but mostly Northern ones—a kind of surprise for both artists, especially the one from the North.”

Sixteen of this West Virginia mother’s boys fought in the Civil War – 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 ‘man from the south’ 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, “Going Across the Mountain” makes no bones about the narrator’s Unionist sympathy.  A bit of digging into the musical legacy of the Civil War in Appalachia, as we’ve done here in the past, reveals several such songs.  Yet, reading “Going Across the Mountain” today as some sort of statement about southerners ‘doing the right thing’ misses the mark, at least to my mind.  Seeger played it that way, as you’ll hear if you check out that whole track.  That’s not what I hear, though, in either Proffitt’s or Anna and Elizabeth’s performances.

Maybe we just can’t 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.  That’s why it’s my choice today.

Coda – “I’ll come back to you…”

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.  It’s no great revelation that songs like “Going Across the Mountain” arise in part in creative response to such feelings.  It’s been that way for a long time, no doubt; perhaps as long as we’ve indulged in the sin of war itself.

I’ll leave you with a short playlist of other versions of today’s song.  Thanks for listening and reading today, folks!