Some weeks ago in this column I wrote about the Irish involvement in the American Civil War. There is a huge story to be told and it will be at a conference in three American cities - Boston, Washington and New York - beginning on October 13th.
Since that first mention, a package arrived from New York containing a CD of the songs sung by Irish soldiers during the war. It amounted to a considerable archive of the tunes and lyrics that kept the troops going - mainly on the Union side - during a terrible conflict.
The singer/researcher is David Kincaid, whose family had Irish roots in the Republic and Northern Ireland. He knows his great-great-grandfather, James McCormick Kincaid, was in the 63rd Pennsylvania Brigade of the Union army and that his great-great-grandmother, Anna Burns, came from Dungannon. He thinks that on the male side his roots are in the Donegal-Sligo area.
However, he has had more success in finding and publishing a rare collection of ballads than with tracing his family tree.
According to a Boston Globe correspondent, Scott Alarik, in a recent article about all this, David Kincaid, who read the Southern Report piece and sent on the CD, sings in a New York band called Brandos, which in 1987 had its first hit with the song Gettysburg.
After that, Kincaid was invited to join the 116th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, a Civil War re-enactment regiment. At a campside gathering one night, he asked about Irish songs of the war and was told there were none. He felt that couldn't be and determined to prove his theory was right.
He was convinced the ballads were there, but where?
Scott Alarik quotes the following lyrics in his article: We love the land of liberty, its law we do revere
But the divil take the nobility, says the Irish volunteer.
He adds that for the Irish soldier, the American Civil War was less about slavery than an opportunity to repay the United States for refuge after famine and failed rebellions. The CD, The Irish Volunteer; Songs of the Irish Union Soldier, 1861-1865, has been made possible by years of meticulous work by Kincaid. He scoured little-known libraries to unearth the forgotten tunes and lyrics of the war, and eventually discovered most of them in dusty old books which the soldiers used to call "songsters".
"Ten years of poring through libraries, museums, historical societies and the Internet slowly yielded ancient, long-buried broadside song sheets as well as actual songsters. Some of the melodies noted were familiar, but many were not.
"The title cut was easy to trace, set to the Bonnie Blue Flag, which had originally been The Irish Jaunting Car. To find more obscure tunes, he haunted New York's many Irish music sessions, asking if anyone knew this jig or that reel. He found two broadsides behind a dirty glass case in a New York National Guard armoury," writes Scott Alarik.
It is a happy chance that Kincaid's researches have borne fruit just as the conference is about to get under way.
As Alarik explains, "What finally emerged is less a set of songs than a saga, telling the heroic tale of a quite different - and quite Irish - Civil War. Its hero is not so much Abraham Lincoln or Ulysses Grant as Gen Thomas Meagher, commander of the Irish Brigade and a veteran of the ill-fated Irish rebellion of 1848".
According to the American historian, Joseph G. Bilby, who wrote the ample notes for the CD, Kincaid's researches were invaluable in documenting, as only the Irish could, through song, a particular and dreadful experience. Had someone like David Kincaid not come along with zeal and a passion to bring them to light again, who knows how long it might have taken to uncover this segment of Irish-American history?
"A friend of mine in New York, who reads The Irish Times, came to me very excitedly one day recently to say that he had seen the Union and Confederate flags on the front page of the paper. It piqued my interest, I read the article and that's why I sent on the CD. I'm thrilled about the conference. I hope I will be able to make some contribution," says David Kincaid.
Here's an example of the lyrics Kincaid unearthed: the ballad was called Meagher is Leading the Irish Brigade. The notes say it was set to the music of The Shamrock Shore, and that the words were as much a prayer that the Irish Brigade would be a step on the road to Irish freedom as they were about the American Civil War:
You true sons of Erin, awake from your slumbers
The war blast is sounding o'er valley and hill
Too long you have slept in the bed of affliction
Your moans pierce my heart like a murmuring rill
Your leaders were banished yet hope never left you
Though firmly bound by the conqueror's chain
So draw your swords quickly, while strength has been left you
And make one bold dash for your freedom again.
And the chorus was: You true sons of Erin, awake from your slumbers!
No longer leave tyrants your valleys invade
Let the long silent harp vibrate its loud numbers
Now Meagher is leading the Irish Brigade.
Stirring stuff. In his notes, Bilby writes: "Although some Irish-American Civil War songs have been recorded in other collections, Kincaid's The Irish Volunteer is the only album of Civil War songs dedicated entirely to the Irish Union soldier."