G'day Ole Bull,

The reference to Confederates sailors (in London to man a British ship purchased by the CSA) buying a concertina was quoted in someone else's thread about sailors and concertinas vs. accordions. I didn't bookmark it and I don't remember any key words to search on.

I would have thought portability to be a strong factor in choice of anything carried by a footslogging soldier ... I am sure I have heard that the mouthorgan became popular as a result of wartime exigencies (as did the cigarette, apparently!). I would expect the lap organ to be a smash hit with the military chaplain ... who would have access to the right amount of approved use of transport spaceand jsut the right tone for the job. Folding-framed harmoniums, not much bigger, remained in use in British Navy vessels well into the 20th century, for the same reasons.

Of course, local taste and availability are big factors and do considerably skew usage between countries. In Australia, the small instruments - cheap concertinas and melodions from Germany - came first with Germanic immigrants of the goldrush era and quickly became popular. If the American Lap Organ was an endemic product, coming from American developments and made locally in America, it would have had a running start in the popularity stakes ... but I'm damned if I can see myself carting one around a battlefield.

Of course, we need to consider just what we do or don't learn from the photographic record (I am a photographer and have worked in archaic processes). In your civil War period, photography was tied to the cumbersome and demanding wet-plate process. The photographer could not get more than a few metres away from his processing darkroom ... usually a wagon, in any sustained field work. The wagon was an easy target for cannon fire, so he stayed well out of the front ... and that means the camps seen would be the well established ones.

Propaganda motives would also dictate the content of photographs presenting the best possible image ... even the trappings of domesticity ... not the gritty life of the poor grunt at the front. It's your war ... but I have read commentaries on the surviving Civil War photographic record that remark on quite puzzling omissions from the period ... determined by all sorts of factors that would never occur to us, raised in an era of ubiquitous, simple cameras.

Anyway, if I were putting money on the most popular soldiers' musical instrument in that era, I think my bet would be on the fiddle! (For the same reasons that made it the basic 'folk' instrument in the Australian bush.)

Regards,

Bob Bolton