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The Battle Hymn of the Republic

music: Anon.

words by Julia Ward Howe

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

THIS TUNE IS SO WELL-KNOWN and has been used for such a variety of words and occasions, it’s surprising we don’t know who composed it or when it was written.

The American Civil War marching song ‘John Brown’s Body’ provides the first famous set of words for the tune, but other versions predate it. Its composition was claimed by one William Steffe, who, years after the fact, insisted that he had written it in the 1850s. But we know it was in circulation at Christian revivalist meetings long before that. Provenance theories abound: that the tune was originally a Swedish drinking song, an African American wedding song and that it was a sea shanty in the British merchant navy.

Wherever it came from, it is certainly well made, its catchiness a function of simple diatonicism allied to an agile, yet eminently singable, melodic line that spans exactly an octave. This agility is reminiscent of both New England shape-note hymnody and the so-called West Gallery singing of Low-Church Anglicanism, both characterised by spirited and joyful melodic lines. Perhaps this accounts for the popularity of the tune at camp meetings from the late 1700s, where it came to be used for a hymn entitled ‘Canaan’s Happy Shore’, with its opening, thrice-repeated line, ‘Oh, Brothers will you meet me’ or ‘Say, brothers will you meet us’ (‘ … on Canaan’s happy shore’). It was at these meetings that the tune first acquired the chorus ‘Glory, glory, hallelujah!’ that would remain with it in both its most famous versions.

By 1861, at the start of the American Civil War, the tune was ubiquitous enough for it to have jokey words put to it by soldiers in the Second Massachusetts Regiment. Two years earlier, the abolitionist John Brown had led an attack on the US arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to initiate a slave rebellion. The raid failed, Brown was tried for treason and hanged. The Massachusetts Regiment had a soldier named John Brown, the butt of many jokes, and the song ‘John Brown’s Body’ became one of them.

‘John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave / His soul is marching on’ went the song, and it caught on fast. So much so that, before the year was out, the poet Julia Ward Howe had been persuaded by her friend, the preacher and theologian James Freeman Clarke, to write a more lofty and elaborate set of words:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,

He has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword,

His truth is marching on.

‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’, as it was called, was sung alongside the ‘John Brown’s Body’ words, though it never replaced them. They simply coexisted. But the ‘Battle Hymn’ went on to acquire an unofficial place at the heart of American life, sung on solemn occasions, its words quoted (and misquoted) in other songs and in literature. The first line gave Martin Luther King Jr the closing line of his final sermon. The title of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath refers to the song’s second line.

Gaining in popularity, the anonymous tune continued to accrue new lyrics, and a curious thing happened to it: the lines became longer, and they acquired more syllables. Consider the following, which are all sung to the same eight pitches:

‘Oh, brothers, will you meet me?’

‘John Brown’s body lies a mouldering in the grave’

‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord’

As the melody became busier, subdividing its beats to accommodate the extra syllables, it also gained in urgency and dynamism, a function of the newly dotted rhythm. And then, just over half a century after Howe’s version of the song was penned, it got longer still.

When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run.

There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;

Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,

But the union makes us strong.

This version is now so closely associated with Pete Seeger, we are liable to forget that it was written four years before his birth – and two years before the Russian Revolution – for the International Workers of the World. The author was Ralph Chaplin and the words are even more overwrought than Howe’s. At last, however, there is a new chorus, ‘Glory, glory, hallelujah!’ replaced by the song’s title: ‘Solidarity forever.’

And so this tune, which might have been Swedish or African American in origin, a wedding song or a sea shanty, goes marching on, transformed at political meetings and in playgrounds, at sporting fixtures and in nursery schools: ‘Glory, glory, hallelujah! / Teacher hit me with a ruler’; ‘Glory, glory Leeds United!’; ‘Father Christmas do not touch me!’: ‘Little Peter Rabbit had a fly upon his nose’.