Open Writing

I recall my father telling me about a song his father, my grandfather, used to sing to him when he was a child in Newport, then in Monmouthshire, Gwent in Wales. Apparently the tears would roll down my father’s face as through his sobs he would say, “Sing it again, Dad!.’’

A year or so ago I was talking to my younger brother about this. “Ah” said Paul, “that’ll be “Just Before the Battle, Mother”. I had not known the title before, neither had our father regaled us with his own rendition of the song.

Armed with this information I went straight on a surf, and came up with much including a download of Will Oakland and chorus from a plastic (not wax) cylinder from the Edison organisation. I was most impressed at this astonishing tear-jerker. Although rather quaint and antiquated, firstly the producers had done a good job in the terms of the early Twentieth Century, and secondly it is a civil war song of the“Right Side (all the Johnny Rebs could come up with was a song about eating peanuts, no wonder they lost). This was written for real people who were killed or injured in this war of brother against brother. Therefore I cannot find it in myself to sneer at the song, its emotions or the recording. However, I make the occasional crack about the high pitch in which Will Oakland sings it, F sharp major I think. Perhaps he has Welsh ancestry. My take on how to achieve this stratospheric range is to don an old pair of very tight Cavalry trousers when singing, that’s Yankee cavalry of course.

So why did a grandfather in Wales know this song well enough to sing it? The answer is the port town of Newport was politically left wing, and during the Civil War across the pond the dockers refused to handle slave cotton from the South. Songs of the American Northern states became very popular in this part of Wales, would you believe? Queen Victoria was not amused by many of Newport’s political activities, and she banned members of the royal family from visiting Newport for a hundred years! The ban was just about up when the then Prince of Wales (later Edward the Eighth) visited Newport during the Depression years, and he was outraged by conditions there. He went on record as saying something like “It’s damnable and something ought to be done about it.” This of course greatly incensed the politicians (who are those who should have “done something”) who viewed such outbursts as interference in the business of government, and all politicos think it is not the business of the Head of State or his relatives! Eventually Edward fell into the hands of his political enemies by marrying American divorcee Wallace Simpson. It is noteworthy that if Charles our current Prince of Wales says anything about anything - politics, the arts, architecture and so on - everyone gets very up tight. It seems the family of the Head of State are not accorded the famous British freedom of speech which their subjects enjoy.

During the recent commemoration of the abolition of slavery in the UK (William Wilberforce etc.) there were calls for apologies for our ancestor’s involvement in the slave trade. You will pardon me if I point proudly to Newport’s history and say “Not from me!’’

I am attempting to make the story become more widespread in the States, of the Newport dockers’ solidarity with our liberal-minded cousins across the pond, and have started with the website:-

www.archeophone.com

Readers might be interested in the free download of Will Oakland and chorus complete with sound effects and noises off. The sotto voce last verse suggests that the person singing may well have become a casualty, one of those who on the morrow lay beneath the sod. The words are also on the site, and much information about the Edison plastic cylinders and Will Oakland’s career. The composer was George Frederick Root, obviously named in the hope that he would grow up to become a composer. It would have been strange if his contemporary, another writer of Civil War songs (Northern side) Henry Clay Work had been christened Wolfgang Amadeus Work.