A Moravian Brass Band enlisted in the Confederate Army. Their music books have been preserved.
Narration to the album- "The Civil War: Its Music and Its Sounds," Frederick Fennell, Eastman Music Ensemble, and others. Band music of the 1860s included.
Lt. Col. Fremantle, British observer, travelling with Lee, noted at the Battle of Gettysburg, "When the cannonade was at its height, a Confederate band of music, between the cemetary and ourselves, began to play polkas and waltzes, which sounded very curious, accompanied by the hissing and bursting of the shells." The band was the Regiment Band of the 26th North Carolina, a Moravian band from Salem, NC. The music books and manuscripts are preserved in the Wachovia Museum in Winston-Salem. Popular music played by them included Luto Quickstep, and Come, Dearest, the Light is Gone, Dixie, Bonny Blue Flag.
Union bands played Mockingbird, Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming, St. Patrick's Day in the Morning, Nightingale Waltz and other popular songs, schottisches, quicksteps and galops as well as psalms and patriotic songs. The album is notable for reproducing pictures of band instruments of the time, and using authentic instruments in the selections.
When Atlanta fell, "Sixty thousand of us witnessed the destruction of Atlanta, while our post band (2nd Mass. Volunteers) and the 33rd. Mass. band played martial airs and operatic selections." Bandmaster Patrick Gilmore, in New Orleans in 1864, took an Irish air and re-fashioned "Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye."


The guitar was widespread in American parlors, not just in Latin American areas. Check through the mid-19th c. sheet music at American Memory and the Levy Collections, many arrangements for the guitar. Firth, Pond & Co. was active inpublishing guitar arrangements.

Small bands, which doubled as orchestras at dances, were common in all western towns from the 1860s onward.