(Belated, But Timely) Midweek Music Break: Fifes and Drums

It can be hard to take the music of fifes and drums seriously. Unlike Sousa marches, which I wrote of last year at this time, these marches have never had one single person’s name — a pop-culture champion, if you will — associated with them. They never even constituted a uniquely American genre: the form sprang from the battlefields of 17th- and 18th-century Continental Europe. Yet you almost never hear it played at other times of the year, only around July 4th*.

In the logbook of human civilization, the United States hasn’t even existed that long. Nevertheless, what we commonly refer to as the Revolutionary War feels like ancient history to us. Anyone who lived through it is long dead, and the manner in which it was conducted scarcely feels like warfare. In some engagements you could probably almost count the shots fired as they were fired. Total deaths on both sides together (considering battles only, not illness, starvation, and other war-related deaths) apparently numbered “only” in four figures. It almost feels like… well, like a toy war.

The sound of fife-and-drum music, to ears accustomed to the window-rattling brass of martial celebrations, itself feels like the perfect music for a toy war. Given enough schoolchildren who know how to whistle, and given enough empty picnic tables to slap their hands on, you could pretty convincingly recreate the sound (if not the discipline) of a fife-and-drum band. Wikipedia says that the flute “sounds an octave above the written music”; even someone musically unsophisticated can see a hint of, well, unseriousness in the instrument so described.

But somehow, the connection between the very adult and the very serious Revolution and fife-and-drum-paced marchers lingers. (Granted, the connection can easily confuse: we were, after all, English at the time. Both sides selected from the same musical catalogue to to accompany their forces in battle.) Part, maybe all, of the credit for this association may belong to the painting reproduced at the top of this post, titled (as you can see at the bottom left corner) Yankee Doodle, but more commonly known as The Spirit of ’76. It’s one of those striking depictions of war which compresses a lot into a single frame, but I’ve always been most struck by the faces of the three principals.

Last year’s post made glancing (haha) reference to the faces, particularly the eyes, of the older drummer and the fife player. (The more I look at it, the more the former seems to resemble George Washington as played, maybe, by the elderly Walter Brennan. Or maybe Buddy Ebsen.) But those adult faces — nor those of the wounded, dying, huzza!-ing others in the scene — don’t even approach the impact of the boy’s face on the left. He’s looking up at the old-timer in the middle, and because their arms and hands are in the same position, held at about the same angles, you might naturally imagine he’s looking to his elder for inspiration, maybe guidance about the timing and pace of the music… you might, but for the expression on the face. He’s the only one in the image who seems remotely aware of what he’s marching into on a personal level. Liberty, independence, all that (he seems to be thinking) — blah, blah, blah, all well and good. But what have you led me into, damn you?!?

Fife and drum corps in the 18th century, as it happened, were often “manned” exclusively by boys, age 10 and up. (If you were older, or at least bigger, your value to the cause lay primarily in your ability to wield a weapon.) Expressions like the one on this little guy’s face in the painting may have been much more common among battlefield musicians back then than the grimly resolved eyes and jawlines of the adults.

This year’s playlist consists of a handful of fife-and-drum tunes selected partly for their familiarity, at least to me. In our household when we were kids, we had (I think) exactly two albums of fife-and-drum music, one of which (I am almost certain) was called Ruffles and Flourishes. The word “ruffles” in that phrase refers not to a feature of clothing but to drumrolls, which come dizzyingly fast in many of these performances. “Flourishes” (in context with ruffles) usually refers to fanfare-like sounds of bugles, trumpets, or other brass instruments; I guess it could refer to fifes, too.

(Except for the last, all songs were recorded by a corps known as the Nathan Hale Ancient Fife & Drums. That final number is by the American Fife Ensemble.)

Playlist:

1. “Yankee Doodle”: I can’t honestly hear the traditional tune here. Maybe it’s me? But I couldn’t not include a song with this title, either.
2. “Jack’s Quickstep”: I don’t know and haven’t been able to find out anything at all about this song. I do like the way the fifes and drums sort of interweave, however.
3. “The World Turned Upside Down”: although it dates to the 1640s, aside from “Yankee Doodle” this may be the one most associated with the American Revolution. (Supposedly, it was played by the defeated British as General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, the war’s last battle. For an opposing — strenuous, adamant, nearly strident — point of view, see this page.)
4. “Stone Grinds All”: No drums, just fife. Until today, I’m pretty sure I’d never heard this at all. Found it on a collection called Birth of Liberty: Music of the American Revolution, and it sounded different enough that I just had to include it. [But see the note below the audio-player widget for a little more about the song.]

Total length of all four songs together: ~4 minutes. Fife-and-drum marches tend to be short — possibly for the fifers’ sake as much as anyone’s.

[Added, after a loooong search] I found a PDF version of what must be the liner notes for the album on which I found “Stone Grinds All.” It says:

“Stone Grinds All,” played on the recording by unaccompanied fifes, is a Scottish tune of which no pre-Revolutionary printings have yet been discovered. In James Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum, Vol. V (Edinburgh, 1788), the tune is published with a bass to Robert Burns’s text “Here’s His Health in Water.” It also appears in Aird’s Selection of Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs adapted for the fife, violin, or German flute, Vol. III (Glasgow, c. 1795), under the title “The Job of Journey Work.”

On YouTube and elsewhere, you can find lots of examples of fiddlers playing “The Job of Journey Work” (sometimes one word, “Journeywork”). Jazz French hornist Tom Varner released, in 1998, an album called The Window Up Above: American Songs, 1770-1998; the first song on that album was “Stone Grinds All” (played by a fiddle, with what sounds to me almost like an electronic-music intro):

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* The US has no particular holiday set aside for commemorating the Civil War (which is also associated with fifes and drums). The closest we come officially is the holiday now known as Memorial Day, at the end of May. It started out, post-Civil War, as Decoration Day. But Memorial Day, dedicated as it is to the memory of war dead and not to veterans in general, was never meant to feel and never has felt celebratory.