Home Sweet Home: A Song History

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“Home, Sweet Home” began life as the signature song of Clari, or The Maid of Milan, a musical stage piece built on a play by the American actor and dramatist John Howard Payne, with music by Henry Rowley Bishop, then composer and conductor at London’s Covent Garden Theatre.[1][2] It opened there on May 8, 1823, with the singer and actress Maria Tree in the title role.[3] The melody was not entirely new: Bishop had printed it two years earlier as a “Sicilian air” in his collection National Airs, and traces of it can be heard in his 1816 stage work Who Wants a Wife?[4] The song caught on across Europe almost at once (Donizetti worked it into his opera Anna Bolena in 1830), and Jenny Lind’s concert performances later made it a standard of the ballad concert.[4] It became one of the best-loved songs of the nineteenth century in Britain, the United States and Australia.[5] With copyright protection weak at the time, Payne earned little from his plays, and one account says the song brought him a single payment and never any royalties.[2][6]

Wood engraving of Union soldiers returning home and embracing their families

Winslow Homer, “Home from the War,” wood engraving from Harper’s Weekly, June 13, 1863. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

Payne, who had accepted an American consular post in Tunis, died there in 1852,[2] a decade before the war that gave his lyric its most famous audience. In the winter of 1862–63, with Union and Confederate armies camped on opposite banks of the Rappahannock River in Virginia, soldiers on both sides were reported singing it together after a band concert, a scene the historian Bruce Catton later described.[7][6] On the night before the Battle of Stones River in Tennessee, bands of the two armies that had been trading patriotic tunes all took up “Home, Sweet Home” in turn.[8][9] Later writers report that Union officers eventually stopped their bands from playing it, fearing it would leave men too homesick to fight or tempt them to desert.[6][10] The sources consulted here do not point to a specific written order, so how widely any such ban applied is unclear.

The melody also passed into instrumental tradition. Fiddlers played it as a waltz, often as the closing dance of a community gathering; it appears in Elias Howe’s Diamond School for the Violin (around 1861) and Louisiana’s Breaux Frères recorded it in waltz time in 1933.[11] The French-Canadian fiddler Joseph Allard, by contrast, recorded the tune as a reel under another title in 1928.[11] In southwestern Pennsylvania, fiddler Harmon McCullough recast the air as a reel, a version documented in Samuel Bayard’s Dance to the Fiddle, March to the Fife.[12]

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Sources

  1. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Sir Henry Rowley Bishop".
  2. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "John Howard Payne".
  3. East Hampton Library: "John Howard Payne, His Life and Accomplishments" (Hugh R. King).
  4. Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music: "Home, Sweet Home Collection".
  5. Museums of History NSW: "‘Home! Sweet Home!’".
  6. HistoryNet (America’s Civil War): "‘Home, Sweet Home’: A Civil War Soldier’s Favorite Song".
  7. Essential Civil War Curriculum (Virginia Tech): "Civil War Music".
  8. National Park Service, Stones River National Battlefield: "Battle of the Bands".
  9. American Battlefield Trust: "Background Information for Civil War Songs".
  10. Smithsonian Magazine: "The Sentimental Ballad of the Civil War".
  11. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Home Sweet Home (1)".
  12. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Home Sweet Home (2)".