The Battle Of Three Trees: A Song History

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"The Battle Of Three Trees" is the fifteenth of the sixteen pieces in DulciFlute, a book of duets for mountain dulcimer and Native American flute by John Keane and Karen Keane, published by Fingers Of Steel.[1] The listing describes every piece as an original, sets out the flute part in notation and the dulcimer part as chords, and supplies a recording of each tune played by the two authors; it does not credit individual tunes to one Keane or the other.[1] The Keanes are Shreveport, Louisiana, performers and teachers who earned music-education degrees at Northeast Louisiana University (now the University of Louisiana-Monroe), and their DulcimerDownloads artist pages describe them as composers with a number of books and recordings of their own work for mountain dulcimer and Native American flute.[2][3] Apart from the recording that comes with the book, the sources consulted here give no date or other recording for this tune.[1][2][3]

Etched landscape with three trees on a rise under a stormy sky, with flat fields stretching to the horizon

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Trees, etching, 1643. Shown for the trees in the title; it has no connection to the tune or to the battle.

A clash of nearly the same name appears on a 1936 State of Texas marker at Lafitte's Grove in Galveston, which records a "Battle of the Three Trees" there between Jean Lafitte's men and Karankawa Indians in February 1821.[4] The marker places the fight at the site of the fort and settlement Lafitte had established there in 1817, which he abandoned and burned in 1821 after the United States ordered him to leave.[4] The Handbook of Texas, which spells the name Laffite, dates a major clash between his Galveston Island colony and the Karankawas to 1819 and does not use the Three Trees name, so the sources consulted here do not settle whether the two accounts describe the same fight.[5] Nothing in the sources consulted here says whether the Keanes had this episode, or any other, in mind when they titled the tune.[1][2][3]

Our book that contains the song "The Battle Of Three Trees"

Sources

  1. Fingers Of Steel: "John Keane And Karen Keane, DulciFlute".
  2. DulcimerDownloads: "John Keane".
  3. DulcimerDownloads: "Karen Keane".
  4. Texas Historical Commission, Texas Historic Sites Atlas: "Lafitte's Grove".
  5. Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas: "Karankawa Indians".
  6. Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, The Three Trees, etching, 1643. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

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