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Music of the United States before 1900

This is an accounting of specific citations used in the article Music of the United States before 1900.

Introductory paragraphs

Examples (of occasional songs of great popularity prior to the late 19th century) include "The Star-Spangled Banner," "Dixie," "Jump Jim Crow," "Oh Susana," "Oh My Darling, Clementine," "The Old Folks at Home," "My Old Kentucky Home," "Battle Hymn of the Republic," "Just Before the Battle, Mother," and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again."

Source: Chase, p. 242 - "Dixie" (as (the song) came to be generally called) became an instant success, with several publishers clashing over the copyright.

Source: Chase, p. 249 - The pontifical John Sullivan Dwight, in his higbrow Journal of Music (1853), had to admit that tunes such as "Old Folks at Home" were sung and whistled by everybody."

Source: Chase, p. 253 - Cincinatti remained Stephen's home base until January 1850, when he returned to Allegheny, and it was during these years that he sprang into sudden fame as a songwriter--particularly of "Ethiopian" melodies, and especially with the immense success of "Oh! Susanna," first performed publicly in September 1847.

Source: Chase, p. 296 - In the spring of 1862 he published a rousing patriotic concert piece for piano titled Union, paraphrasing and combining the three most popular "national" airs: "Star-Spangled Banner", "Yankee Doodle," and "Hail Columbia."

Source: Crawford, p. 206 - Its melodic idiom fits with that of Jump Jim Crow, Zip Coon, Coal Black Rose, and other early blackface favorites.

Source: Crawford, p. 277 - Band performances of such numbers as The Battle-Hymn of the Republic, The Bonnie Blue Flag, The Battle Cry of Freedom, and Dixie popularized their melodies and enhanced the band's inspirational role.

Source: Crawford, p. 288-289 - One of the most popular Civil War songs, When Johnny Comes Marching Home, was published in (Boston) in 1863, "introduced and performed by Gilmore's Band," as its cover proclaimed."

Unsourced: "My Old Kentucky Home", "Just Before the Battle, Mother" and "Oh, My Darling Clementine"

most scholars would point to Native American music, Civil War ballads or the First New England School (as the first form of distinctly American music)

Source: Struble, p. xvii - Apart from the music of the colonial New England singing masters..., the ballads of the Civil War became the first American folk music with discernible features that can be considered unique to America: the first "American" sounding music, as distinct from any regional style derived from another country.

New England choral traditions

The original Puritan immigrants to New England sang a number of spiritual psalms

Source: Chase, p. 3 - It is true that the so-called Pilgrims--actually a separatist Puritan sect--were psalm singers both by ordinance and predilection, as were many other dissenting Protestant sects, both in Great Britain and on the continent.

Source: Crawford, p. 22 - The Pilgrims at Plymouth sang from a psalter translated by the Reverent Henry Ainsworth, a separatist clergyman who had brought out The Book of Psalmes: Englished both in Prose and Metre in Amsterdam in 1612.

but (the original Puritan immigrants to New England) generally disliked secular music, or at least those varieties which they viewed as encouraging immorality and disorder.

Source: Chase, p. 3 - The only sort of "secular music" that they "hated"--more correctly, "deplored"--was that which they had good reason to believe was inimical to morality.

Source: Struble, p. 2 - But before very long a livelier tradition of singing grew up in the rural communities, and the Puritan fathers of Boston took pains to discourage what they viewed as wanton, frivolous and sensual ornamentation in the singing of these psalms.

They also objected to the use of musical instruments in churches and a complex vocal liturgy, both being associated with Roman Catholicism.

Source: Chase, p. 3 - It is also true that the early Puritans objected to the use of musical instruments in churches, as well as to an elaborate vocal liturgy, because they associated these with the "Romish" ritual that they strongly repudiated.

The well-known minister Cotton Mather wrote, in Directions for a Candidate of the Ministry, on the subject:

Source: Chase, p. 4 - While insisting on the importance of skill in singing, Cotton Mather, in his Directions for a Candidate of the Ministry, took what may be fairly regarded as a permissive view of playing an instrument for personal recreation: (followed by quote, reproduced verbatim, emphasis in Chase)