Hold The Fort! The Story of a Song from the Sawdust Trail to the Picket Line

Abstract

This is a history of a gospel song, which I first learned about a decade and a half ago while a historian in the Department of the Army&amp;apos;s old Signal Corps Historical Division. I have been occupied with the song&amp;apos;s history off and on ever since. Even as I concluded this account-to illustrate how the history of the song marches on-I heard from my friend John I. White of Brielle, New Jersey, that cowboys used to sing not only lullabies and ribald range songs to their herds but also "Hold the Fort" and other gospel songs. He said he had learned this interesting piece of information from the book <I>Cattle</I> by Will Croft Barnes (an old Signal Corpsman, by the way) and William McLeod Raines. About the time that White wrote to me, <I>The New Yorker</I> published a Weber cartoon in which a middle-aged man tells his stolid wife, who is seated before the family television set: "I&#39;m going out to get a paper. Hold the fort." As my friends will attest, I have been saying much the same thing for as long as they can remember.<br/>Numerous thanks for assistance rendered me in this undertaking are scattered through the footnotes, but I would like to give special thanks to the following persons for their specialized and generous help and encouragement: Fred E. Brown of Houston, Texas; Joe Glazer of the United States Information Agency; Walter Rundell, Jr., chairman of the history faculty at Iowa State University; Alice Cole Scheips of the Industrial Union Department, AFL-CIO; Annie L. Seely of the United States Army Photographic Agency; Irwin Silber of New York City; Vincent H. Demma and Loretto C. Stevens of the Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army; and the members of the staff, past and present, of the Music Division, Library of Congress.<br/>P J. S<br/>Washington, D.C.<br/>January 1971