Dear Friends -
First, look at http://www.mudcat.org/@displaysong.cfm?SongID=6575

This is called "The Last Fierce Charge." Listen to the tune. I heard an abbreviated version (only, what, ten verses!) by Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard in the 'Seventies, on their wonderful eponymous LP, with a different tune. Relying on a twenty-year old memory, they cited the Baltimore Sun Newspaper after the Battle of Fredricksburg as the origin of the lyrics. I fell in love with the song. I subsequently discovered a version, different from the one Hazel and Alice had, and different from the Mudcat version, with a different tune and lyrics (but similar lyrics), in a slim volume by Canadian folklorist Helen Creighton, which I discovered in Bill Berg's bathroom in, I think maybe 1983. (Mountain Made Music, which was then in Nashville, Indiana.) Creighton--once again relying on old memory--attributed its origins to the Crimean War, saying, if I remember correctly that she collected the song in Nova Scotia.

Boy-oh-boy there's some great scholarship getting published on our great folk songs (See Laws A17). See, for example, Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson (Vintage Books, ISBN 0-375-70827-8) about the Galveston Flood of 1900 (see http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=10406#71919)
and Wolf of the Deep, by Stephen Fox (Knopf ISBN 978-1-4000-4429-0) about the Alabama privateer in the Civil War
see: http://www.mudcat.org/@displaysong.cfm?SongID=5033

I'd appreciate any suggestions, scholarship, discoveries about Two Soldiers, AKA Last Great Fight/Charge.
If you cc djames@tiompanalley and tell me you've a posting on Mudcat on this subject that would be even more wonderful.

Tell me you've posted!

Thanks
David James (tiompanista)