Marching Through Georgia: A Song History

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Union songwriter Henry Clay Work wrote both words and music of “Marching Through Georgia,” and the Chicago firm of Root & Cady issued it in 1865.[1] Work, born in Connecticut to abolitionist parents, was a printer by trade and a largely self-taught composer whose songs Root & Cady published.[2] The original sheet music dedicates the song to Sherman’s march from Atlanta to the sea, and its five verses follow the army to the coast, touching on the Union flag and on how enslaved people, Union loyalists and Confederates met the advancing troops.[3]

Group photograph of General William T. Sherman seated among his generals in uniform

George N. Barnard, “Sherman and His Generals,” from Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign, 1860s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The song was a major success in the North, selling over half a million copies within about a dozen years and turning up again and again at political rallies and old soldiers’ reunions.[1] Sherman himself is said to have grown to dislike it intensely, because he heard it at almost every public occasion he appeared at;[4] he is quoted as saying that, had he imagined the march would inspire such a piece, “I would have marched around the state.”[1] In parts of the South it stirred anger for decades, and Fuld’s The Book of World Famous Music called it “the most hated song in the South.”[4] The melody has had a long afterlife: Charles Ives worked it into his orchestral Three Places in New England, Princeton once adopted it for a football song, and it was heard in the film Gone with the Wind (1939) and in Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War (1990).[1]

The tune also passed into band and fiddle playing, mostly north of the Mason-Dixon line, where it was documented among Pennsylvania fiddlers and at New York dances; West Virginia fiddler Clark Kessinger had it among the first tunes he learned, and an autoharp version by Ernest Stoneman also circulates.[4] Among its early commercial recordings, the vocal duo Byron G. Harlan and Frank C. Stanley cut it for Victor in October 1904.[5]

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Sources

  1. New Georgia Encyclopedia: "Marching through Georgia".
  2. Library of Congress: "Henry Clay Work (1832-1884)".
  3. Connecticut College Digital Commons: "Marching Through Georgia by Henry Clay Work".
  4. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Marching Through Georgia".
  5. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix B-1746. Marching through Georgia / Byron G. Harlan ; Frank C. Stanley".