JUST ANOTHER REBEL?
        words and music by Charles Stephen Sedberry

A standing stone upon the hillside,
Coosa flows along below.
Such a peaceful-looking river
where this youth   drowned long ago.

Chorus: Was he just another rebel
        back before that bloody civil war
        or did-- he understand that freedom
        is something we-- must all keep fighting for--?

On the stone it should say, "William,"
for that was my-- uncle's name,
but it just gives his initials
to abbre--viate his pa--rents pain.

Anna Jane was his mother,
Shadrack Hogan was his pa;
his brother* was my great grandfather
in the years-- before the great-- civil war--.

Had he lived he'd have been a soldier,
but he drowned at-- seventeen.
Was his death an early blessing
to save-- him from some gory battle scene--?

© Copyright 1986, 1990 Steve Sedberry
*(my great, grandfather's oldest brother, William H. Sedberry, was born in North Carolina on 21 July 1840. As an infant he was moved to Wetumpka, AL then to Cherokee County, AL shortly after the Cherokees were "removed". Charles Augustus Sedberry, my great-grandfather and partial namesake, was born in 1849 but died in 1883 less than two months after his last child, my grandfather, John Gaston Sedberry, Sr., was born. When William, or "Billy" ,as he may have been called, drowned in the Coosa River near Leesburg on 12 Dec 1857, his body was buried behind what is now Cedar Hill Methodist Church Cemetery. Perhaps he drowned as did my great, great, great grandfather, Moses Rushton, (Jan. 1859, Montg. Co., AL) by attempting to cross without the benefit of a bridge.
One recording of this song is by Rebekah Stober and her Down Home Family Band. Contact: Carol Stober, Box 1275, Talladega, AL 35160.
It's also on my out of print cassette album: What We Dream.