Marching Song of The First Arkansas - Recordings

Recordings

Soon after Silber's book appeared, two recordings were issued based on his version, one by Pete Seeger and Bill MacAdoo on the album Songs of the Civil War, released by Folkways Records in 1960. Tennessee Ernie Ford recorded the second on the album Tennessee Ernie Ford Sings Civil War Songs of the North, released by Capitol Records in 1961. The Seeger-MacAdoo folk song version includes three verses, and Ford's gospel quartet version includes four. Both recordings skipped the controversial fourth stanza. Seeger and MacAdoo's version is now a Smithsonian Folkways recording, and Ford's version is available as Bear Family Records BCD 16635 AS. Keith and Rusty McNeil also recorded a three-stanza version of the “Marching Song” in their three-CD set of Civil War Songs. The song is in their self-published Civil War Songbook. Sparky and Rhonda Rucker included four verses from the “Marching Song” in a medley titled “Glory Hallelujah Suite” on The Blue and the Grey in Black and White, released by Flying Fish Records in 1993. The bluegrass album Songs of the Civil War Era, self-published in November 2005 by ShoreGrass, contains a recording of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in which the first and second stanzas of the Marching Song are included.

Sweet Honey in the Rock recorded Truth's song in 1993 on their 20th anniversary album, Still on the Journey. Bernice Johnson Reagon, Sweet Honey's founder, renamed the song “Sojourner's Battle Hymn.” Truth's biographers Erlene Stetson and Linda David describe the song as “rousing, brashly defiant, irreverent and joyous,” and characterized Sweet Honey's version as “stirringly performed.” In 2006 the Sojourner Truth Institute and Heritage Battle Creek produced a CD, Am I Not a Man and a Brother? Songs of Freedom North and South, with talented local singers and musicians from Battle Creek, Michigan, including a rendition of “The Valiant Soldiers” by Carolyn Ballard.

In the opera Appomattox by Philip Glass, the chorus sings a variation of the tune in Act One.