On The Road To Boston: A Song History
"The Road to Boston" is an American march in 2/4 time that American military fifers were playing during the Revolutionary War.[1] It turns up in musicians' manuscript tune books of the period, including a copybook of about 1776–1778 that belonged to the teenage fifer Thomas Nixon Jr., where it is headed "March to Boston."[2] Another copybook, kept by William Morris in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, in about 1776–1778, names it "We are on our march to Boston," and manuscripts dated from about 1790 to 1798 file it as "General Greene's March."[1] The Tune Archive, citing Winstock (1970), reports that in 1853 a 93-year-old Benjamin Smith of Needham, Massachusetts, counted it among the most popular tunes of the American army in the Revolution.[1]
Bernard Romans, An Exact View of the Late Battle at Charlestown, June 17th, 1775, hand-colored engraving, ca. 1775. The 1775 battle outside Boston, shown for the era of the fife tune; it has no connection to the march.
Under the title "March to Boston" it was printed in a run of fife and other instrumental tutors between 1800 and 1818, from Samuel Holyoke's Instrumental Assistant to Alvan Robinson's Massachusetts Collection of Martial Musick.[2] A suggestion that it began as a British tune called "Road to London" remains unproven, and Samuel Bayard's idea that the name came from a New England game song finds no support in the historical record.[1] Fiddlers took it up too: it was noted from an elderly Pennsylvania fiddler in the 1930s, printed in Don Messer's collections of 1939 and 1980, and recorded by Messer, Graham Townsend and Rodney Miller.[1]
Massachusetts law now names "The Road to Boston," composer unknown, as the Commonwealth's official ceremonial march.[3] Shelley Stevens includes it in Jamming With The Baritone Mountain Dulcimer, a Fingers Of Steel book that shows how retuning a single string lets the baritone join a jam in the key of D, with thirty-six tunes set in ADA tuning.[4]
Sources
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "Road to Boston".
- The Traditional Tune Archive: "March to Boston".
- Massachusetts General Laws: "Chapter 2, Section 27: Ceremonial march of commonwealth".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Jamming With The Baritone Mountain Dulcimer".
- Image: Bernard Romans, An Exact View of the Late Battle at Charlestown, June 17th, 1775, hand-colored engraving, ca. 1775. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.