“A Lone Grave, on the Battle-field of Antietam” – Alexander Gardner, September 19 or 20, 1862 (Grave just below the tree holds the remains of John Marshall, Co. L, 28th Pennsylvania, as established by William A. Frassanito.)

As Memorial Day here in the States always falls on a Monday, it’s become a ‘thing’ for us here at MBM to try and capture its essence by sharing some meaningful music with you.  This year the honor of trying falls to me, and I’ve picked a song that moves me deeply – that hits me hard lyrically yet elevates me musically.  I hope it does the same for you.

I’ve also picked a photograph to share.  It emerged from the back of my mind while I was writing about the song, and now that I’m done writing I know why.  Like the song, it tells a soldier’s tale that is well worth knowing.  I’ll get to that in the Coda below, but let’s hear the music first.

“Levi” – Old Crow Medicine Show

Ketch Secor heard a story on NPR, dated July 6, 2009, about the combat death of First Lt. Leevi Barnard, killed by an IED in Baghdad that previous May 21 while on duty with his National Guard unit.  Near the end of the story the reporter revealed that Leevi often made his friends listen to his favorite song, “Wagon Wheel” by Old Crow Medicine Show, and that the song played at his funeral.  Secor, a fiddle-playing founding member of the band, was deeply touched.  He told what happened next in an interview with Mother Jones magazine.

“Well, the first thing I did was write down some lines, and then I wrote a letter right after that to Leevi’s mother and father saying, “I’ve written a song about your boy, and where can I send it?” And then we recorded it. And we played it for them near their hometown last summer. They all came out, his grandmother came out, and the song was complete…  I feel that song really connects me to this boy I never knew. I had to take liberties about it, and I had to make assumptions about it, and I had to write about somebody dying. That is somebody’s son and somebody’s brother and somebody’s best friend. I don’t want anybody to feel like it’s an anti-war song or a pro-war song, just a story about a kid that came to me through the radio.”

Check out the studio version here – but I think this live performance with its energy and nuance is most worthy of attention.

Born up on the Blue Ridge at the Carolina line
Baptized on the banks of the New River
Brought up on bluegrass and the clear moonshine
yeah, tough as iron but a heart soft as leather

Levi!  Lord, Lord, Lord, they shot him down,
ten thousand miles from a southern town.  Oh, Levi!

Like a fire on the mountain, running wild in those days
playing ‘Knights of the Golden Horseshoe‘ and ‘Indian Raids’
Now it’s parachutes and combat boots and camouflaged airplanes
and a country boy who don’t belong in the desert anyways.   Levi! …

Well the Sandbox sure gets lonesome
and it’s a hundred and nine degrees,
Singing “Carry Me Back to Virginia“
Lord I’m down here on my knees!

In a market square while the bells were ringing loud to fill the air
Levi gazed his eyes out through the rocket glare,
beyond the desert and the ocean to the furthest fields of home.
And when the bullets pierced his body he was already gone!   Levi! …

The “liberties” Secor took with Barnard’s story help us all connect.  We all had our own adventure games as children, and using local history as fodder for such imagination is something to which many can relate.  Along with the fictions he imagined, the facts Secor gleaned about Leevi from the NPR story ground the song’s Levi firmly in a place and time.  He was a Virginian, a country boy from a place where the piedmont meets the mountains – but, the chorus tells us, he died “ten thousand miles from a southern town.”  We all know what it’s like to feel horribly out of place, to feel endangered and alone.

The Girl I Left Behind Me – Eastman Johnson, early 1870’s

Further, those of us who listen to folk music know that the lyrics of the chorus help us feel the power of this song in a most familiar way.  The NPR story makes it clear that Leevi was killed by an improvised bomb.  But, while Secor chose to accurately paint the setting as a market square, his Levi’s death comes by gunfire. “Lord, Lord, Lord, they shot him down!”  It’s about a murder, in an idiom we understand.

Yet, this is more than a brief murder ballad.  My fellow blogger Ken notes, for example, the allusion Secor makes with his fiddle to “The Girl I Left Behind Me” (around 0:05 and 1:33 in the video above) with its martial cadence and implied theme of loneliness.  And there’s that last verse – immensely moving and not typical of our genre of choice.  Levi knows his true place so deeply that the desert and the ocean, indeed even the bullets, cannot separate from Home.  In the fire of battle he’s already there before the enemy cuts him down.  They couldn’t take that away from him.

Secor makes it clear in the interview above that the song isn’t political.  It’s just much more personal than all that.  We can gain some insight into how in his interview for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, when he talked a bit about the OCMS album Carry Me Back on which “Levi” appears.  In speaking about another song on the album – “Carry Me Back to Virginia“, the traditional version of which is referenced in the lyrics of “Levi” – Secor reveals something of his inspiration for connecting with soldiers’ stories.

“My fascination comes from a boyhood primarily raised in the South…  We traveled a lot. And, in every town, I’d see a boy that looked about my age carved out of stone in the middle of a court house square. I wondered about him.”

Secor, quite familiar from his youth with the highland south, wrote a song for an Appalachian brother he never knew but who loved his music.  “I think about him every time we perform it, and I know he’d be pleased.”  And thanks to that act of love and respect, we all get to honor and remember Leevi’s name.

The Blue Ridge Mountains seen from the Deep Gap overlook in western North Carolina – photo by Ken Thomas, public domain

Coda – A view from the high ground on the Mumma farm

On September 17, 1862 the ground between the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland and Antietam Creek ran with more American blood than any one place on any single day of our history.  Such facts must of course obscure individual stories to make their impact, yet they can not be fully and deeply known without an understanding of that one soldier left behind in Earth.  His life meant something.  On Memorial Day we each confront the fact in our own way that his death still does, as indeed does that of every son and daughter lost in war.

Alexander Gardner’s photograph from Antietam at the top of this post appears distant, seen through a broken window of time – almost lost.  It is not fresh and painful like an image from Iraq or Afghanistan.

But the high resolution of the original plate allowed William A. Frassanito in the 1970’s to make out a name on the headboard of the soldier’s grave just below the tree.  He published his findings along with much else in his Antietam: The Photographic Legacy of America’s Bloodiest Day.  With his knowledge of the topography of the battlefield, he found the original burial spot on what was in 1862 the Mumma family farm.  And with a little historical sleuthing, he established the soldier’s identity.  He was a father – born in Ireland in 1812, forty-nine years old when he signed on to fight for Pennsylvania, and fifty when he died an American.  He left behind his second wife and three young sons, William, Samuel, and John Jr., aged ten, four, and one.  Today Private John Marshall rests in Antietam National Cemetery, grave 19, lot A, section 26.

William Frassanito uncovered the personal history buried in an image of war a century and a half distant.  Ketch Secor fixed music and imagination to a story of war still open and raw in the present.  Both honored a soldier, one father and one son; both made sure that someone will remember their names, for a while longer at least.

An American soldier is comforted after the death of his buddy, while a corpsman fills out the casualty tag – Korea – August 28, 1950. Photo by Al Chang, U.S. Army. public domain