By Kailey Watson, Arts, Culture and Sports reporter
Geoff White, musician and historian. (Courtesy of Geoff White)
Geoff White is a lifelong musician whose talents found their calling in Civil War-era music. Through reenactment events and lectures, White shares tunes of the time with all who will come to listen.
After moving to Virginia in 2007, he and his wife began participating in civil war reenactments. White brought his fiddle, and his journey began by wanting to have more songs to play around the campfire. He would later receive a Bachelor’s in History in 2013 from Radford University, where he was employed, and worked on studies dealing with music from the Civil War. From there, White began performing combined concerts and lectures from battlefields to retirement homes.
The following questions and answers were edited slightly for length and clarity.
How do you find the Civil War-era songs that you’re playing?
The Civil War was a unique period in history because so many of the people who fought it from the bottom up, the privates and the rankers, were literate. So we had this explosion of literacy, people being able to write letters and diaries and accounts, but you also have that same thing with musical literacy. Music was much more for the masses, and not just passed down through the oral tradition.
As far as what we call Parlor Music, a lot of that is readily available. Another avenue would be the music that was printed and distributed to the musicians who were in the army. You also had people going around documenting and recording what musicians were playing. In some cases, it can be very difficult to find just how old this tune is or how new this tune is.
There’s also another avenue, which would be during the Depression. The Works Progress Administration went around to people who were former slaves and said, we need to document what these people have to say about the lives they led before nobody is alive who remembers it at all. They’re what we call the slave narratives.
In some cases, they also had people singing songs that they actually recorded with a tape recorder. They were very, very young when these things were happening. But at least they have primary sources.
Have you noticed any difference in being able to find music from one side or the other?
No, I don’t think there’s any sort of difficulty on one side or the other. There’s plenty available on both sides, or neutral. Just songs that both sides enjoyed, because when it comes down to it, it’s Americans fighting Americans.
As far as picking and choosing, I try to present songs from both sides of the war. Not to express any sort of bias or sentiment towards one side or the other, but to put it in a historical context.
What were these songs typically about?
It could be about anything, because these soldiers were people. They were normal, common people.
Sometimes they’re singing about battles. There was an old song called “The Mockingbird,” where the soldiers repurposed it to be about the siege of Vicksburg, and they’re talking about the parrot shells whistling through the air.
There are a lot of songs about food. I mean, it’s fundamental for existence, right? So why not sing about food? You had songs about the beans that they ate, or about goober peas.
There’s love, like Lorena, a song about a lost love.
I thought about this a lot when the pandemic happened. There was this sentiment that I heard over and over again. It was, “when this is over.” When the pandemic’s over. There was a refrain and a civil war song, “when this cruel war is over, when this war is over,” there’s always this, let’s just get past this. So there was a sentiment that I’ve seen and sort of experienced when we went through this life-changing, traumatic event of the pandemic.
They were looking back or saying, this sucks. We want to look ahead. You know, to win, so all this crap is done.
It was a very hyperbolic time. It was a time when people spoke and wrote very passionately about what they were experiencing. So you see that reflected in a lot of the media and in the books and the literature and, of course, the music. You know, they were wax poetic in a way that we don’t do exactly right now about anything and everything under the sun.
For your lectures and events, do you speak solely about the history of the songs, or do you also include general history?
I’m talking about the history of the song, but in some cases, the song has a story to tell beyond just who wrote it, when it was about and what was happening in the world.
I do a tune called the Spanish Waltz, which you might have heard at West Point. The education for these up-and-coming officers was not just to be an officer. These men were expected to move through the higher echelons of society without embarrassing themselves, their unit and the US Army. They were trained how to eat properly at a formal dinner. How to dance properly.
There might be a problem that you foresee when you have a single sex school. How do you teach the men to dance? Well, half the men have to wear an armband, so they learned the ladies’ part of the dance. And so that’s an interesting way of thinking about what it would have looked like then at the US Military Academy. I use the Spanish Waltz as a way of talking about that. Now I’m going to play the Spanish Waltz, and you can let your imagination run wild.
What is the importance of keeping the music of this time alive?
My first response is, just because it’s good music. I don’t want to see that die on the vine. These songs and these musicians deserve to be remembered in some way.
Another thing is that when we learn about the Civil War in a very immersive environment, like a reenactment, one of the things that helps contribute is hearing the music. That can help transport you back in time, just like going to the symphony and hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony can transport you back to when people were listening to that kind of music.
It’s one thing to read about history. It’s another thing to smell history right at a reenactment, and holy cow, well, you smell history. You can taste history. You can hear history when talking about the music. So that’s my stock and trade, hearing history.
> THE NEWS FEED < 