How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found

[randy_byers]

Last night I watched Dodge City -- a 1939 Technicolor Western directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, and Alan Hale fresh from the triumph of The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), but alas no Una O'Connor. There's no movie that couldn't be improved by the presence of Una O'Connor, and while Dodge City has some great moments, it needed something more. Although I'll give it credit for giving us a Western hero played by the Australian Errol Flynn as an Irish soldier of fortune turned cowpoke turned (over the course of the movie) frontier sheriff. I also liked one of the early title cards: "Dodge City, Kansas - 1872. Longhorn cattle center of the world and wide-open Babylon of the American frontier - packed with settlers, thieves and gunmen."

Curtiz gets some love from auteurists like Dave Kehr, but I haven't really noticed a particular thematic voice in his work. He was a very successful studio director who was given big budget projects like Dodge City. This is one of those A list spectacles that strings one familiar trope after another and stages them in grand style. One of the best sequences is an epic barroom riot. But what was interesting from an auteurist point of view was what started the brawl. One group of bar patrons started singing a song, and then another group started trying to drown them out with "Dixie". The two groups try to outsing each other at the top of their lungs. This is of course reminiscent of the scene in Curtiz's Casablanca (1942) where the Nazis start singing "Das Deutschlandlied" in Rick's Cafe and the other patrons counter with a stirring rendition of "La Marseillaise" -- always one of my favorite scenes in the movie.

I didn't recognize the song that was countered by "Dixie," but I'm really wondering about that. It turns out to be a famous Civil War song by Henry Clay Work called "Marching Through Georgia." Is it really possible that I've never heard this song, or did I just not recognize it? It sounds like I really should know it. The Wikipedia article claims that "Outside of the Southern United States, it had a universal appeal: Japanese troops sang it as they entered Port Arthur, the British Army sang it in India, and an English town thought the tune was appropriate to welcome southern troops in World War II." I'm fascinated by the lyrics, particularly this verse:

How the darkeys shouted when they heard the joyful sound
How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found
How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground
While we were marching through Georgia.

They just don't write war songs like that anymore, do they?

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

There's a number of Civil War era songs that are famous in the sense that one often sees references to them, but that I've never knowingly heard. This is one of them. (To be distinguished from the ones like "Dixie" and Stephen Foster songs that are certainly known to me, though I'm not sure if they've passed down to the next generation or two.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I've just listened to the MIDI file linked to from the Wikipedia article. Tremendously catchy tune, which I'm quite sure I'd never heard before.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I'll have to give it a listen when I get a chance to see if I recognize the tune from the movie. The scene in which the two groups try to outsing each other gets to the point where we're cutting back and forth between the two songs, only hearing snatches of each.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I've sung "While We Were Marching Through Georgia" many times. Back when I was a conservative, we party-of-Lincoln Republicans trotted that song out against states-rights-"Dixie" Republicans all the time. I had no idea that this was a movie trope.

The chorus is what stays in my head:

Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the jubilee
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea
While we were marching through Georgia

While we were driving through Georgia a few weeks ago, we stopped briefly at the site of the battle of Resaca, one of the battles leading to Sherman taking Atlanta. I am always moved and confused when I visit Civil War battlefields. What a lot of people fought and died in that conflict; how very bloody is much of the ground throughout the south; was my ancestor at this battle? By the time of Resaca, he was in a Union prisoner of war camp near Toledo, Ohio, so, no.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Well, I hope the conservative groups who sang those songs at each other (was this at Yale?) didn't end up in a fist fight, which is how it goes in the movie. Although of course it's just good clean All-American fun in the movie, despite the fact that the bar is destroyed in the process.

Sherman apparently got sick of the song, because it was played for him everywhere he went, even in Europe.

It may have been Wikipedia that pointed out that at least two alternate history novels have taken their titles from the lyrics: Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee and S.M. Stirling's Marching through Georgia.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Yes, this was at Yale. No, we didn't hit each other. Some of the more traditional conservatives threw all the libertarian conservatives (and some of the other traditional conservatives) out of the party at one point, but we used Robert's Rules of Order to our own advantage and got back control of the group. I'd make a smug claim that this shows the moral superiority of libertarians over trads, but some years before, a group of libertarian conservatives had thrown out many of the trads of that day in an earlier purge. The evicted trads had not been as skillful in their use of Robert's, so they stayed thrown out for a few years, and the splinter party formed on that occasion still exists at Yale.

I no longer have enough knowledge of Robert's Rules to employ it as a dangerous weapon.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

an English town thought the tune was appropriate to welcome southern troops in World War II

There's a picture to conjure with. Golly.

The chorus sounds tantalizingly familiar to me, but I couldn't place where or when I might have heard it. (If you didn't go listen to the brass band link from the Wikipedia article you should -- it's an old-timey sounding rendition that might approximate how it was sung when they were serenading Sherman.)

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Now I'm wondering whether the Russian troops sang the song in that little dust up in South Ossetia last year.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Bad Man.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Whoa, speaking of the bizarre details of the world, Wikipedia reports that in the wake of that war South Ossetia and Abkhazia were recognized as independent republics by Nicaragua and Venezuela. Shades of the Coalition of the Willing, when the Federated States of Micronesia stood tall beside America in Iraq. ("The government of one country, the Solomon Islands, listed by the White House as a member of the coalition, was apparently unaware of any such membership and promptly denied it.")