How Civil War Soldiers Sang About Wounds

Claude Bauer

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Jan 8, 2012
And now for something completely different. From the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in historic Frederick, MD, we learn from Dr. Catherine Bateson "How Civil War Soldiers Sang About Wounds." Guess it was inevitable that with all that wounding and dying, out of the 11,000 songs composed during the Civil War, some 250 of them would be about or include reference to wounds and death.




 
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One of my all-time favorites: "Somebody's Darling."

Into the ward of the clean white-washed halls,
Where the dead slept and the dying lay;
Wounded by bayonets, sabers and balls,
Somebody's darling was borne one day.
Somebody's darling so young and so brave,
Wearing still on his sweet yet pale face
Soon to be hid in the dust of the grave,
The lingering light of his boyhood's grace.

Somebody's darling, somebody's pride,
Who'll tell his Mother where her boy died?

Written as a poem in 1864 by Confederate nurse Marie Ravenel DeLacosta of Savannah. She requested Hermann L. Schreiner of J. C. Schreiner & Son music firm to put it to music. It became popular in the North, as well as in the South. It is definitely the most touching of all Civil War songs.
 
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