The Rebel Soldier: A Song History

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"The Rebel Soldier" is a Civil War lament in which a lonely Confederate soldier, far from home, grieves over his separation from all he left behind. The Traditional Ballad Index classes it as a folk song of Appalachia and the wider South (Roud 259) and gives its earliest documented date as 1918, from the collection of John Harrington Cox.[1] Cox printed the song as No. 76 in Folk-Songs of the South (1925), a volume gathered under the auspices of the West Virginia Folk-Lore Society, although the Index notes that only the first of his two texts is this song.[1][2]

Hand-colored ambrotype of a young soldier in a gray private’s uniform holding a small cased photograph

Unidentified young soldier in a Confederate private’s uniform holding a cased photograph, hand-colored ambrotype, 1861–65. Liljenquist Family Collection, Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

Collectors found it across a wide area. Cecil Sharp's English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians gives seven texts with tunes under the double title "The Rebel Soldier, or The Poor Stranger," though the Index judges that at least one of them is really a separate song, and Sharp and Maud Karpeles also included an abridged composite version in Eighty English Folk Songs.[1] Further versions turned up in the Ozarks, where Vance Randolph's text ties the soldier to General Sterling Price's Missouri campaigns, as well as in Texas, Mississippi and Indiana; Carl Sandburg's The American Songbag carries a variant called "The Troubled Soldier."[1] In the Indiana text the singer is no rebel at all, simply a stranger.[1]

The song shares a good deal of material with its neighbours in the Southern repertoire. Its opening line wanders between songs, with several versions starting from "One Morning in May," and the Index finds its verses mixed into texts of "Rye Whiskey" and "Jack of Diamonds."[1] The Index also lists it among the songs sharing floating lines with "The Wagoner's Lad," a piece that has itself swapped many verses with "Rye Whiskey."[3] Today the American Battlefield Trust offers "The Rebel Soldier" among its Civil War music resources as a Southern Appalachian song of a Confederate missing his family and sweetheart, noting that many soldiers on both sides were young and unmarried.[4]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Rebel Soldier".
  2. Internet Archive: "Folk-Songs of the South" (John Harrington Cox, Harvard University Press, 1925).
  3. The Traditional Ballad Index: "The Wagoner's Lad".
  4. American Battlefield Trust: "Civil War Music: The Rebel Soldier".