Song Name: When Johnny Comes Marching Home (also known as "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again")
Year of Release: 1863
Written By: Patrick Gilmore
Released by: Never formally recorded, though renditions exist
Key Lyrics: "When Johnny comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah!/We'll give him a hearty welcome then, hurrah, hurrah!/The men will cheer, the boys will shout/The ladies they will all turn out/And we'll all feel gay when Johnny comes marching home."
Description: The song was written by Irish-American bandleader Patrick Gilmore under the pseudonym Louis Lambert, though his reasons for using a pseudonym remain unknown. The song's lyrics depict a soldier's hometown welcoming him back home from the war with open arms and expressing joy that he has survived. One theory on the song's origins is that Gilmore wrote the song for his sister Annie, whose fiancé was off fighting in the war. Gilmore himself claimed that the song originated from a tune he heard another person humming. The song became immensely popular among both sides of the war, as both sides could relate to its themes.
Why It Was Important: The song was popular among both sides despite it being written by a Union bandleader; one reason for this was that its themes of families and towns wanting men to come back home alive was a concept that transcended political differences. The melody was perhaps the most enduring feature of the song, since it was co-opted for other purposes: for example, Confederate soldiers created a song called "For Bales" using the melody of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home," which made fun of Union soldiers for looting while in New Orleans. It was used in the children's song "Ants Go Marching." In terms of political uses, a song called "If the Johnnies Get Into Power," released in 1880 to support Republicans James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, used the melody of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" (the Johnnies in the song were the Democratic nominees for President and Vice President, Winfield S. Hancock and William H. English), showing that the uses of the song in politics did not stop when the war ended