Tramp, Tramp, Tramp: A Song History

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“Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!” was written by George F. Root (1820–1895), a Massachusetts-born songwriter and music teacher who in 1860 joined the Chicago publishing house Root & Cady and went on to write some thirty songs about the Civil War, among them “The Battle Cry of Freedom” and “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! (The Prisoner’s Hope).”[1] Root & Cady issued the song in 1864, and one surviving copy is a four-part (SATB) choral setting.[2] The verses are sung by a captured Union soldier thinking of his mother and home, while the chorus imagines the tread of comrades marching to set the prisoners free.[3] That hope spoke directly to Union men in Confederate prisons such as Andersonville, where talk of an approaching relief force never died away.[3]

Wood engraving of Union troops marching in a long column across a bridge over the Potomac by moonlight

Winslow Homer, “The Advance Guard of the Grand Army of the United States Crossing the Long Bridge over the Potomac, at 2 A.M. on May 24, 1861,” wood engraving, 1861. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0).

The melody soon outgrew its Civil War subject. In December 1867 the Irish writer Timothy Sullivan set new words to it as “God Save Ireland,” commemorating the three Irishmen known as the Manchester Martyrs; by his own account the song was being sung in Dublin homes on the very day The Nation printed it.[4] The tune also passed into Irish instrumental tradition: it appears as a march in Roche’s 1912 Collection of Traditional Irish Music, and its title is on a list of tunes that a Louth piper brought to the 1898 Feis Ceoil in Belfast.[5] It also carried the American Baptist minister C. H. Woolston’s 1912 children’s hymn “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” which hymnals have paired with Root’s melody, sometimes under the tune name TRAMP, TRAMP, TRAMP.[6]

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Sources

  1. University of Maryland Libraries: "Polly H. Carder collection on George F. Root".
  2. Lincoln Memorial University, Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum: "Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!: The Prisoner of Hope" by Geo F. Root and Root & Cady.
  3. American Battlefield Trust: "Civil War Music: Tramp, Tramp, Tramp".
  4. The Victorian Web: "Irish Nationalism, British Imperialism, and Popular Song".
  5. The Traditional Tune Archive: "God Save Ireland".
  6. Hymnary.org: "Jesus Loves the Little Children".