Doodletown Fifers?

Subject: Doodletown Fifers?
From:
Date: 29 Sep 98 - 01:12 AM

Second time I asked here about this.

What is the real name for this tune? It was played to no end on the PBS series about the American Civil War. I have it recorded by a jazz band in the 1940's under the unlikely name of Doodletown Fifers, so I don't believe that it was written for the series and called Ashokan Farewell.

If someone has an ABC or midi of either or both tunes please post so that I can compare them. Thanks.

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From: Dale Rose
Date: 29 Sep 98 - 09:22 AM

There's an album by the Doodletown Pipers for sale at this address http://www.charm.net/~musicman/folk1.html

Have you used ProFusion search? Try that. Set it for phrase, with summary, choose manual and select all engines EXCEPT Lycos! Lycos always returns too many useless references. If it's on the net, that should get it.

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From:
Date: 29 Sep 98 - 02:40 PM

I have since found Ashokan Farewell and listened to it and it is not the same tune. I am still curious what the fife and drum tune was that they kept playing on the PBS series, and which I have recorded in the 40's apparently without a title. Or at least on my Cd.

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From: Bob Bolton
Date: 29 Sep 98 - 07:26 PM

G'day all,

Just a passing though from pedant with a taste for multilingual puns ... is the name Doodletown Fifers a legacy of some German player, for whom the word for a musical pipe is dudel - hence the glorious German name for a bagpipe: dudelsac?

Regard(les)s,

Bob Bolton

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From: Jack Hickman
Date: 29 Sep 98 - 11:03 PM

In response to Tim's comment about the relationship between Doodletown Fifers and Ashokan Farewell. I don't know where that notion originated, but I do know that Ashokan Farewell was not written specifically for the Civil War Series. From what I have read, including notes on the sheet music, Jay Ungar composed it in recent years. and the Ashokan referred to is a little lake in the Catskills, near Kingston, NY, where Unger used to spend his summers. The Civil War series really made it famous, I don't think there's a traditional fiddler anywhere who doesn't do it.

Jack Hickman

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From: BSeed
Date: 30 Sep 98 - 12:57 AM

The song that I knew that I kept hearing through the Civil War was "Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier," "Shoolah, shoolah, shoola roo, shoolah rack-shack...." Is that the one you heard, Tim? --seed

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From:
Date: 30 Sep 98 - 02:54 AM

Yes, I have since listened to the fiddle tune, as recorded by Jerry Holland, and it is not the one.

The tune I have in mind is as fife and drum sounding as they get. I am not familiar with Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier -- is that the one, I've got my knapsack on my back,My rifle on my shoulder, I'm going down to Shiloh, And here I'll be a soldier? If so, that isn't it.

I don't know the shoolah song, but the words above don't scan to the tune I have in mind.

I wish I had the capability to do a simple midi. Does this involve a piano-like keyboard and a separate card? My problem is that I have a laptop and can't add standard cards.

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From: BSeed
Date: 30 Sep 98 - 12:10 PM

Tim, the verse starts something like this:

Here I sit on Buttermilk hill;
Who can blame me cry my fill?
And every tear would turn a mill--
Johnny has gone for a soldier.

It's on the DT, as is a variation called "Shule Agra" which begins with the line "With fife and drum he went away"

"gone for a soldier" in US Civil War times refers to the practice whereby, if a man had enough money, he could hire someone else to go in his place if he were drafted. The man he hired was said to have "gone for a soldier." The other song, Shule Agra, is British, out of York. The version of the song I learned had the mournful "shoolah" from the chorus spelled "shule" as I recall now. Makes me wonder if the American variation came out of the Jewish immigrant population, the younger generation of which may have been poor enough that the payment could have done much for the family, and could even have been seed money for starting a family business. --seed

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From: BSeed
Date: 30 Sep 98 - 12:24 PM

By the way, Tim, there's a fantastic Midi file on "Johnny Has Gone for a Soldier," not much as I remember the tune (except for the first line). The whole thing is taken from a banjo lesson tape by D. D. Wyler (?). It's much faster and not nearly so sweet as the song I know, but is more in the fife and drum genre, perhaps. After the "gone for a soldier" lesson, the file closes with an unintroduced "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" which is as fast as but quite different from Earl Scruggs' version. Amazing what clicking on a link sometimes gets you. --seed

Subject: Lyr Add: THE YEAR OF JUBILO
From: Dick Wisan
Date: 02 Oct 98 - 09:10 PM

Er, um, back to the Doodletown Fifers. Along about 1963 or so, there was a cute, fairly popular instrumental by that name. You heard it a lot on the radio. Dunno who the musicians were.

The tune was "The Year of Jubilo", Civil War minstrel show --very yankee, the words would certainly have been found insulting by Southerners & probably by Black people, too. It's the song that begins:

Hey Darkies have you seen the massa
With the moustache on his face,
Goin' down the road some time this mornin'
Like he g'wine to leave the place.
He seen the smoke way down the river
Where the Lincoln gunboats lay.
And he took his hat and he left very sudden
And I 'spec he run away

Chorus:

De massa run, ha! ha!
De darkies sing, ho! ho!
It must be now the kingdom comin'
And the year of jubilo.

I think the tune was used --1939 or so?-- as the theme music for the Charlie McCarthy show.

Just tried to see if the DT has the words but something kerfluffled, and all I can get is:

400 Bad Request

Request cannot be handled by the server.

Reason: Connection with Host: header containing unknown local host name "www.mudcat.org". Received on IP address 207.44.42.65, which is not bound to any virtual server. Cannot proceed.

:-(

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 03 Oct 98 - 02:50 PM

Hi, Tim - if you can play MIDI files on your laptop, you can enter them on Noteworthy Composer or any number of other programs. You can enter tunes with your mouse, your computer keyboard, or from a MIDI keyboard. I don't read music very well, so I learn tunes from sheet music by copying them into Noteworthy and playing them. Here's the URL for Noteworthy: http://www.ntworthy.com/index.html
-Joe Offer-

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From: bigJ
Date: 04 Oct 98 - 06:58 PM

Re: Doodletown Fifers, there was a splendid version and arrangement made of it some 20-30 years ago by the Sauter Finnegan orchestra, I think it was on the same record as their 'Midnight Sleighride' (Troika) success.

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From: Bill in Alabama
Date: 05 Oct 98 - 04:34 PM

Dick-- Actually, "Year of Jubilo" was fairly popular among Confederate soldiers in the ranks. It was released in 1863, just about the time that the Confederacy began conscripting on a large scale, and allowing any man who owned twenty or more slaves to be exempt from the draft. This confirmed in the average southerner's mind that the war had become a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight, and the southern soldiers became quite fond of this dialect song. I seem to recall that it was written by Henry Clay Work.

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From: Dick Wisan
Date: 06 Oct 98 - 12:32 AM

Bill,

Thanks, I didn't know that about the song. I wasn't thinking who'd be offended in 1863, but about 1966, when, at least in Florida, where I was living then, the tune was popular all over the radio, but without words.

I was living in Florida at that time, and I sometimes had a wild fantasy of writing an angry letter to the radio station: '"Doodletown Pipers" indeed. Don't you know what Mr. Doodle's first name is? Next thing you'll give us a trumpet solo of "Marching Through Georgia" & call it "Blue Bugle".' I do think people (just about everybody) in the 1960's would indeed have been more displeased by those words than anybody in the 1860's would have been.

BTW, the DT database is working again, & I found it under "Kingdom Comin" or just "Jubilo". Heavier "dialect" misspellings than I ever saw before.

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From:
Date: 06 Oct 98 - 06:58 PM

And that, indeed, is it. Mudcat triumphs again.:)

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From: toadfrog
Date: 20 Jul 09 - 09:10 PM

Kingdom Coming, by Henry Clay Work (1862). I had only known part of the second verse, which my mother used to sing. A fine tune. The words won't cut it because they were too topical. They are politically incorrect, but the problem is even more basic. Up to the minute political words are often impossibly stale ten years later. A lot of those political "folk songs" from the 1960's have gone the same way.

Subject: RE: Doodletown Fifers?
From: GUEST,Geereid
Date: 08 Oct 12 - 12:52 AM

"The nest verse to "Year of Jubilo" is:

He six foot one way, two foot tudder, and he weigh tree hundred pound,
His coat so big, he couldn't pay the tailor, an' it won't go halfway round.
He drill so much dey call him Cap'n, an' he got so drefful tanned,
I spec' he try an' fool dem Yankees for to tink he's contraband.