John Brown's March: A Song History
The Traditional Tune Archive keeps two separate, numbered entries for American tunes called "John Brown's March."[1][2] The first is classed as an old-time march in G, in standard fiddle tuning, with two repeated strains in most of the settings it cites.[1] Its listed sources include Harlan Coble of Guilford County in the North Carolina Piedmont, Pete Sutherland of Vermont, and a setting from Alan Jabbour by way of Alan Garren.[1] Jim Taylor recorded it on The Civil War Collection (1996); he learned it from banjo player Sheila Adams, who had the tune from Tommy Jarrell and Scott Ansley.[1]
Meacham & Co., Fife, American, wood and brass, early 19th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown because one of the tunes is a fife march; this fife has no connection to it.
The second is a 4/4 march in G that the archive places in southwestern Pennsylvania, notated from fifer James Taylor of northern West Virginia and southwestern Pennsylvania, with the 1930s given as the date, and printed in Bayard's Dance to the Fiddle (1981).[2] The archive cross-references it with "Harper's Ferry" and "John Brown the Emancipator," and names it for the abolitionist who seized the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry in 1859 and was hanged for treason.[2] It mentions a belief that the "march" was Brown's walk to the scaffold but flags that idea as possibly apocryphal.[2] In the sources consulted here, neither tune is identified with the melody of "John Brown's Body" or the "Battle Hymn of the Republic."[1][2]
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