The Battle Of Shiloh Hill: A Song History

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The Battle of Shiloh, fought on April 6–7, 1862, near Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, took its name from a log meeting house called Shiloh, and the two days of fighting left a combined 23,746 men killed, wounded or missing.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index credits the words of this ballad to M. B. Smith of the 2nd Texas Volunteers and gives its earliest date as 1874, in Allan's Lone Star Ballads.[2] One account adds that the version printed by Irwin Silber places Smith in Company C of that regiment.[3] The narrator is a survivor looking back on a hard and costly fight who wishes for no more battles of its kind; some versions mention a second battle on the hill, which the Ballad Index explains as the second day, when reinforced Union troops drove the Confederates back.[2]

Nineteenth-century print of the small log Shiloh meeting house among trees, with a few figures and a horseman nearby

“Shiloh Church,” print, nineteenth century. The meeting house gave the battle its name. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The song passed into oral tradition. G. Malcolm Laws listed it as A11 among American ballads of war, and it is Roud 2200; the Ballad Index records texts from North Carolina (the Frank C. Brown Collection) and central West Virginia, and it notes that the piece should not be confused with another ballad on the same battle, "The Battle of Shiloh" (Laws A10).[2] In the Ozarks, Vance Randolph took down "The Battle on Shiloh's Hill" from Judy Jane Whittaker of Anderson, Missouri, in 1928 and printed it with its tune in the second volume of Ozark Folksongs.[4][2] That Ozark text later appeared in Alan Lomax's Folk Songs of North America, while Silber's Songs of the Civil War printed the longer text carrying Smith's name.[2][3]

The ballad is still recorded today; Alice Wylde, for example, included it as "Shiloh's Hill" on her 2013 album Songs of Old Appalachia.[5]

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Sources

  1. National Park Service, Shiloh National Military Park: "Shiloh History".
  2. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Battle of Shiloh Hill, The [Laws A11]".
  3. Genealogy Today: "Songs of Yesterday: Civil War Series, Part 1 - The Battle of Shiloh Hill".
  4. Kodály Center for Music Education, American Folk Song Collection: "Battle on Shiloh's Hill, The".
  5. Mainly Norfolk: "Alice Wylde".