Howe vs. Yankovic

Long ago, in this very blog, I posted about something I discovered which I called Ordinal Awareness Fallacy. It is when you assume that things happened in the same order that you knew about them, but they didn’t.

That particular post was when I first encountered a pomelo, a citrus fruit somewhat like an orange. I assumed that a pomelo was hybridized from an orange and some other fruit. But when I did some research, I found out I was exactly wrong. The pomelo came first. In fact, the orange is hybridized from a pomelo and a mandarin.

But I had known about oranges my whole life and only recently encountered the pomelo. And that’s where the fallacy came in. Just because I knew about one of them first doesn’t mean it existed first.

I recognize that I may not be the first person who ever made note of this phenomenon. Maybe it has been written about before, but I didn’t know about it before I discovered it. So I could have Ordinal Awareness Fallacy about Ordinal Awareness Fallacy.

But I also had Ordinal Awareness Fallacy about something else. Here at the Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, we went to the John Brown Museum. It is about John Brown, his life before the raid on the U.S. Armory, the raid itself, and the aftermath of the raid including his death. In one of the videos at the museum, there was a chorus singing “John Brown’s Body.” It goes like this:
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the ground.
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the ground.
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the ground.
His soul is marching on.

You may have guessed, it is to the same tune as The Battle Hymn of the Republic. So I assumed that someone wrote new lyrics to the existing Battle Hymn of the Republic, but about John Brown. I was wrong on both counts.

John Brown's Fort - where he made his last stand

 

The Ordinal Awareness Fallacy is that John Brown’s Body existed before The Battle Hymn of the Republic. However, it is also a set of new lyrics to an older song called Say Brothers, Will You Meet Us?

But I was also wrong that the song was about John Brown, or I was sort of wrong. The origin of the song is way more interesting.

The lyrics were written, originally, by Union soldiers in the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia. They had a sergeant named John Brown. What amused them so much was that John Brown the abolitionist was a larger-than-life figure, depicted as gigantic, with powerful arms, an unwieldy beard, and blazing eyes of judgment. Whereas Sergeant John Brown was small, quiet, and even-tempered. It was this juxtaposition that so amused the soldiers of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, and that led them to write the lyrics. The body a-mouldering in the ground was John Brown the abolitionist. The soul that was marching on was the mild-mannered sergeant.

The song caught on with other Union regiments, and they wrote more lyrics, bawdier lyrics, bloodier lyrics. Eventually it was being sung by soldiers who had no idea it was about Sergeant John Brown. They thought it was only about the abolitionist. And it became very popular among Union troops.

Writing new lyrics to existing songs, that’s something I enjoy. I am a big fan of Weird Al Yankovic, Allan Sherman, and Spike Jones. These are just a few of the artists who have engaged in the practice of song parodies. The idea goes back millennia. In fact, the word parody comes from the ancient Greek para (beside or altered) and ode (song). Parody songs are funny. Even in Ancient Greece where the word parodia referred to burlesque songs. (So maybe they weren’t all funny, maybe they were dirty. But that was probably funny.)

But how did this bawdy song become The Battle Hymn of the Republic? Julia Ward Howe was a published poet of some repute at the time of the Civil War. She was in Washington with some other dignitaries and was invited to see a marching and inspection of Union troops. And while the soldiers were marching, some of them were singing John Brown’s Body.

One of Howe’s colleagues, a reverend, suggested that she write “better lyrics”, probably meaning cleaner ones. And she did, the very next morning. Howe said that she woke up in the middle of the night with words in her head, hastily jotted them down, and then in the morning discovered she had written The Battle Hymn of the Republic. That’s an amazing story that must have involved a lot of midnight jotting, because the full song has five verses (plus lots of glory, glory hallelujahs.)

The song was soon published and became a huge hit among Union supporters. It also became wildly unpopular in the south, because the song placed God on the side of the Union. It reframed the war as a war for what was capital R Right and capital G Good. For example, in verse five there is a line that reads “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make them free.” (The “he” in that sentence is Christ.)

So here is the question I pose to you. What do you call this, writing lyrics to an existing song but not to make it funnier? Rather to make it more serious? It’s not parody, right? Maybe intrody? Serody? Dramody? (I suppose that’s too close to dramedy, which is already a thing.)

I don’t know. But it is not the same fine art of the Honorable Yankovic and Squire Sherman. It is another fine art of its own.

And I wonder if I am wrong about assuming that parody songs came first and serody songs came second? I am drowning in my own fallacy. Or someone else’s.