Tenting Tonight on the Chautauqua Circuit

By Walt Giersbach

Love of country can be expressed many ways, but patriotic music comes to the fore most often during wartimes. Songs of conflict reached a peak during the Civil War, bringing us "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again," written by Patrick Gilmore, and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" by Julia Ward Howe. "Dixie" was originally a minstrel tune. But one song was written and played by fighting men of both the North and the South.

I first heard "Tenting Tonight on the Old Campground" when I was an eight-year-old, never knowing the connection it had to my grandmother who was a young woman long after fighting ceased in 1866.

I eagerly anticipated tales of Indian lovers and horrifying winters when my grandmother came to stay with my folks each summer in the 1940s and ‘50s in Oregon. My reward for patience came when Grandma, who we called Moms, let me sleep with her in the rope-strung, four-poster bed with the canopy that formed a tent. Her furniture filled the guest bedroom, welcoming her back from her winter home in Florida.

I would rush to get in my PJs and pull the comforter up to my chin while she unbraided her long gray hair and placed her false teeth in a glass of water. 

Then the stories began. My favorite was about a boy, born in New Hampshire years ago, "who would rather die than hoe beans," she said. "But his father and mother were of a wiser sort, and taught him that it was ‘work first and play afterwards.'"

Moms said that with the boy's talent for music, "He took the hollow stock of a seed onion and fashioned a flute. When his father saw what the boy had done, he felt that such genius should be encouraged, and bought him a seraphine."

"What's a seraphine?" I asked.

"It's an old reed instrument, with keys, and you pumped it to get the air blowing. But, the boy and his sister learned to play. They played everything they knew, and when these were exhausted they made up songs of their own.

"The years passed until the young man was twenty-one years of age, then he went down to Boston, purchased a horse and wagon, and a little melodion—like a seraphine—and started out through the countryside giving concerts in schools and churches.

"Then came the time," she said, "when Uncle Sam touched him upon the shoulder and said, ‘Come, follow me.' I do not doubt but to him, as to every strong young man, came the horror and dread of war, but it never occurred to him to seek an excuse why he should not enter his country's service."

I knew who Uncle Sam was, and I remembered the air raid sirens that told me we'd gone to war against the Germans and Japanese, but she was talking about some long-ago remembered war, so I was quiet.

"He was away the night the summons came, and all the way home to Reeds Ferry, New Hampshire, the words and music to a little song kept running through his mind. When he reached home he took down an old violin from the wall, played it, and wrote a simple little piece.

A few days later, she said, he went down to Concord to take his examination for service. He was found physically unfit and was dismissed, so he never did bear arms for his country. But about that time, there was a demand for a song by which the soldiers might march and sing in camp. The Oliver Ditson Company advertised for such a song, and half trembling at his own temerity, the young man sent down the simple little song he had written the night of his draft, offering to sell it to them for fifteen dollars.

"They tried it over," she said, "and they were disgusted because of its simplicity. They refused to have it at any price. Instead, they hired a musician of considerable note to write a song for them. But, the soldiers simply wouldn't sing it. Then, because the call was insistent and the need was great, they remembered the little song they had refused, purchased and published it, and in less than six weeks it was being sung by every Southern campfire and in every Northern home."

Moms would pause to make sure I was still tucked in—and still awake. Then she continued.

"I remember when I was a little girl seeing an eccentric looking man come into our yard. He was driving a brown horse hitched to a pink express wagon, and in the back was strapped a little melodion. My father and mother—your great grandpa and grandma—received him with joy, and his melodion was set up in the kitchen, for he would have nothing whatever to do with the parlor." Great-grandpa Ballou had been a private in the 7 th Regiment of the Vermont Infantry, she reminded me.

"I've always remembered that I was allowed to sit up, far beyond my usual bedtime, while I listened to my father and mother and their friend talk, often to be sure about things which I couldn't understand. But I liked to listen to his kindly voice and watch his gentle, genial smile.

"At last they sang songs, sometimes songs in which my father and mother joined him, sometimes songs which he sang alone, and at last he told us this little story of his boyhood and youth, practically as I'm telling it to you tonight, and sang us the little song he had written the night of his draft, the song that has made the name of Walter Kittridge known and loved all over our country." And she began to sing softly, and sadly.

"We're tenting tonight on the old camp ground, give us a song to cheer,

Our weary hearts, a song of home, and the friends we love so dear.

   Tenting tonight, tenting tonight,

   Tenting on the old camp ground."

Many are the hearts that are weary tonight, wishing for the war to cease,

Many are the hearts, looking for the right, to see the dawn of Peace.

We've been fighting today on the old camp ground, many are lying near,

Some are dead, and some are dying, many are in tears."

Moms passed away in that canopied bed in 1961 at the age of 86. The bed, and photos of her, are now in the spare bedroom of my house.

This year, I finally went through a carton of papers that had been stored for more than forty years. In it were programs, postcards, and news clippings of Marion Ballou Fisk—my Moms—who traveled the Chautauqua Circuit week after week between 1906 and 1926 to support her family. She was billed as America's Foremost Lady Cartoonist when musical entertainment and morally uplifting lectures were delivered under the large tents. In small towns across America, this was the only source of culture and respite from weary, rural chores.

In the box were the hand-written stories—including this one—and a photo of her as she told crowds across the United States about Walter Kittridge (1834 - 1905), the man who wrote one of the Civil War's most famous ballads. Her lectures are now in the University of Iowa library archives for all to read.

I'm sure that one of the most rapt audiences Moms ever had wasn't a real audience at all. Just a small boy sleeping under the "tent" in her four-poster bed.

______________________________________________________________

Walt Giersbach spent his career as director of communications at Fortune 500 companies before returning to creative writing. His non-fiction appeared this year in Good Old Days, on web e-zines, and in an article on King Philip's War in Military History Online . He is currently working on an anthology of short stories reminiscent of O. Henry and a novel set in Taiwan during the Vietnam war. He lives in Connecticut.