Goober Peas: A Song History

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"Goober Peas" is a comic soldiers' song about the peanut, a humble food that kept hungry Confederate troops going in the last years of the Civil War.[1][2] A sheet-music edition appeared in 1866 from A. E. Blackmar of New Orleans, set for voice and piano with a verse-and-chorus form.[1] The title page credits the words to "A. Pindar, Esq." and the music to "P. Nutt, Esq.," both of them jokes rather than real people.[1][2] "Goober" and "pindar" were each regional names for the peanut, and both trace back through the Atlantic slave trade to Central African words, Kongo and Kimbundu nguba and Kongo mpinda.[3]

1864 photograph of a large crowd of captured Confederate soldiers camped in a hollow at Belle Plain, Virginia

Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Camp of Confederate Prisoners at Belle Plain Landing, Virginia, photograph, May 12, 1864. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The song is generally described as having been popular among Confederate soldiers during the war, before Blackmar printed it.[2] One trace of that circulation appears in the 1913 memoir Reminiscences of a Rebel by Wayland Fuller Dunaway, a Confederate captain who spent about twenty months as a prisoner of war, part of it at the Johnson's Island camp on Lake Erie: a chapter about his captivity opens with a prisoners' version of the song, swapping camp life for scant rations and Union guards.[4] Who first made up the verses is not known from the sources consulted here.

The song was later taken up by folk-revival performers. Burl Ives is listed as singing it on Songs of North and South, the third album of his Historical America in Song set issued by Encyclopædia Britannica Films around 1950,[5][6] and the New Lost City Ramblers, with John Cohen singing lead over guitar, banjo and fiddle, recorded it for the Folkways album Songs of the Civil War in 1960.[7]

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Sources

  1. Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection, Johns Hopkins University: "Goober Peas" (Box 093, Item 074).
  2. Voices Across Time, University of Pittsburgh: "Goober Peas".
  3. NPR (via NPR Illinois): "A Legume With Many Names: The Story Of 'Goober'".
  4. Project Gutenberg: "Reminiscences of a Rebel" by Wayland Fuller Dunaway (1913).
  5. Wikipedia: "Historical America in Song".
  6. SecondHandSongs: "Goober Peas" by Burl Ives.
  7. Smithsonian Folkways: "Goober Peas" (The New Lost City Ramblers, Songs of the Civil War).