Together Apart

ED: Now there’s one other famous song that commemorates the War of 1812. And if you were around in the late ’50s, early ’60s, there’s a good chance you’ve heard it.

JOHNNY HORTON: In 1814 we took a little trip with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip. We took a little bacon and we took a little beans. And we caught the bloody British in a town in New Orleans.

ED: That’s country music star, Johnny Horton, singing The Battle of New Orleans. And as you may remember from earlier in the show, that was the battle that sealed the deal on the war, the one where Andrew Jackson routed the British and secured a future for himself in American politics. But the fact that this story survives today is at least in part thanks to that song, which was a number one hit on the Billboard charts in 1959.

JOHNNY HORTON: We fired our guns and the British kept coming. There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago.

ED: To understand how a country song about a battle in an obscure war sold more than half a million copies, you have to go back 20 years earlier to Mountain View, Arkansas and to the song’s author, a man named Jimmy Driftwood.

BILL MALONE: I don’t suppose that he ever had any idea in 1936 that he would one day become, if not the major hit of all time, at least one of them.

ED: That’s Bill Malone, author of Country Music USA. And he told me that Driftwood wasn’t a professional songwriter when he composed that song, Battle of New Orleans. Instead, Driftwood was a high school teacher of history.

BILL MALONE: You know, Jimmy Driftwood had originally written the song, he says, in 1936 when he found that his students just couldn’t get the difference between the American Revolution and the War of 1812.

ED: So the song was written to be a study aid. But it also fit into a much larger folk music tradition that gave it a lot of resonance.

BILL MALONE: The music was part of a genre of songs that were described as saga songs, best described, I guess, as story songs, songs about real events like the sinking of the Bismark or the Battle of New Orleans or just mythical events like the long black veil and the Tennessee stud.

ED: Fast forward 20 years. It’s 1958. The saga song is suddenly all the rage thanks to the Kingston Trio’s hugely popular revival of an old folk song called Tom Dooley.

KINGSTON TRIO: Hang down your head, Tom Dooley. Hang down your head and cry.

ED: Now, right around this time, Jimmy Driftwood, the high school teacher, is a arriving in Nashville to have a go at a second career as a songwriter. He records an album of songs that he’d written, an album with the admittedly somewhat dubious title, Jimmy Driftwood Sings Newly Discovered American Folk Songs. One of those songs is his old classroom ditty about Andrew Jackson’s big win.

JIMMY DRIFTWOOD: Well, in 1814, we took a little trip along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississippi. We took a little bacon and we took a little beans. And we met up with the British near the town of New Orleans.

ED: Enter country singer, Johnny Horton. He is hip to the folk revival trend. As soon as he hears The Battle of New Orleans, he knows he’s found the saga song that he’s been looking to cover.

JIMMY DRIFTWOOD: Well, we look down the river and we see the British the come–

JOHNNY HORTON: –and we see the British come. And there must have been 100 of them beating on the drum. They stepped so high and they made the bugles ring. We stood beside our cotton fields and didn’t say a thing. Oh, we fired our guns–

ED: And when we think about folk music, we often think about protest music. You think about Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul, and Mary, and Joan Baez. So here’s a different kind of folk music, a music that was written to celebrate the American past, a music that was coming out of the country music tradition, out of Nashville from people like Johnny Horton and Jimmy Driftwood. I asked Bill Malone how this song, The Battle of New Orleans, fit into this musical scene of the late ’50s and early ’60s.

BILL MALONE: I think it was part of that recurring interest in traditional song that show up in our music. But also, coming as it did during the Eisenhower era when we were engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, I think a lot of people were looking for songs that would reassure them.

ED: So you’re telling me that when they were singing about chasing the Red Coats, they’re really chasing the red stars, that they’re imagining that we’re really kind of overcoming the Russians.

BILL MALONE: I think that could be part of it.

JIMMY DRIFTWOOD: Old Hickory said we could take them by surprise if we didn’t fire our muskets ’till we looked them in the eye.

ED: Yeah, here in the Cold War it seems very distant and cold and all fought through, threaten missiles.

BRIAN: Push button war, Ed.

ED: Yeah, that’s right, Brian. It’s kind of satisfying to imagine the enemy running through the brambles and we can see the whites of their eyes. You know, that’s the kind of war that you can actually understand.

BRIAN: Yeah, and a war in which real men stepped up and defended America.

JIMMY DRIFTWOOD: Yeah, they ran through the briars and they ran through the brambles. And they ran through the bushes where a rabbit couldn’t go. They ran so fast that the hounds couldn’t catch them on down to Mississippi through the gulf of Mexico.

ED: So looking back, it’s not too hard to see that the Battle of New Orleans, so popular, was in many ways a parable, a metaphor, and a fantasy about the world of 1959 as much as it was about the world of 1812.

BRIAN: And that’s where we’re going to have to leave things today. As always, we’d love to keep the conversation going online. Drop in at backstoryradio.org or find us on Facebook. Tell us why they named this the War of 1812.

If you were naming the war, what would you call it? Can you do better? We’ll forward our favorite suggestions on to the proper authorities.

PETER: That’s at backstoryradio.org. Don’t be a stranger.