It is All About the Fallen Whether It is Decoration Day or Memorial Day

  

The first wide-spread Decoration Day was observed in Northern states and at Union cemeteries in the former Confederacy by order of General John A. Logan, Commander of the Grand Army of the Republic in 1868. 

Note—This is a regular Memorial Day history post.  It’s good to be reminded.

Today is official Memorial Day in the United States.  The Uniform Holiday Act, passed in 1968, set 1971 as the year the Federal government would begin observing the holiday on the last Monday of May giving Americans a three-day holiday weekend to start the Summer season, to be balanced by a three-day Labor Day weekend in September.   Saturday, May 31 would be the traditional last-day-of-May celebration

Veteran’s groups were nearly unanimous in opposition to the move fearing that it would dilute the observance as families planned fun activities instead of solemnly commemorating the war dead.  Several states refused at first to change their observances in conformity with the Federal law creating two Memorial Day holidays.   That proved unworkable and eventually all fell in line. 

Of course, the veteran groups were right.  Attendance at their parades and cemetery services dropped off in favor of barbeques or a day at the beach.  Every year attempts are made to restore the traditional date. 

The origins of that celebration go back to the end of the Civil War.   Almost as soon as the firing stopped communities were gathering to honor their dead, which in the sentimental 19th Century naturally meant trekking out to local cemeteries to festoon the graves with flowers.  Some credit the first organized commemoration to Confederate widows.  

Former slaves mass to salute the Stars and Stripes at the dedication of the cemetery they built for the Union soldiers who died in a Confederate prisoner of war camp on May 1, 1865.

Others claim that former slaves in Charleston, South Carolina originated it when they reburied Union soldiers who died in a Confederate prisoner of war camp there and dedicated the cemetery they created as a Union graveyard.  A local paper said that up to 10,000 people, mostly former slaves, were present for a dedication of the graveyard on May 1, 1865 marking the occasion with singing and prayers. 

Local observances sprang up in towns and cities both North and South.  Waterloo, New York lays claim to the first Decoration Day, as it became known with an observance on May 5, 1865.  It was surely not the first, and just one of many.  But the friendship of the local leader of the celebration, General John Murray with General John A. Logan, the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R) planted the idea of creating a national observance.   

 General John A. Logan, Commander of the Grand Army of the Republic is heroically remembered in this hill top Grant Park monument in Chicago.

On May 5, 1868 Logan issued G.A.R. General Order No. 11 instructing local posts to participate: 

     The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

We are organized, comrades, as our regulations tell us, for the purpose among other things, of preserving and strengthening those kind and fraternal feelings which have bound together the soldiers, sailors, and marines who united to suppress the late rebellion." What can aid more to assure this result than cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foes? Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms. We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders. Let no wanton foot tread rudely on such hallowed grounds. Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.

If other eyes grow dull, other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remain to us.

Let us, then, at the time appointed gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us a sacred charge upon a nation's gratitude, the soldier's and sailor's widow and orphan.

It is the purpose of the Commander-in-Chief to inaugurate this observance with the hope that it will be kept up from year to year, while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades. He earnestly desires the public press to lend its friendly aid in bringing to the notice of comrades in all parts of the country in time for simultaneous compliance therewith…

To this day, Logan’s order is often read at Memorial Day observances conducted by the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and other veteran organizations. 

Confederate Memorial Day ceremony at Woodington Universalist Church in Lenoir County, North Carolina 1920.

Decoration Day was soon observed across the North, and at Union cemeteries in the South.  For many years it was confined to the Yankee dead and was thus boycotted by Southern states, most of which designated their own separate memorial days for the Confederate Dead.  It was not until after the Spanish American War in 1898 in which Southerners served in arms under the Stars and Stripes once again, that the notion began to spread of honoring all the war dead—although this was fought tooth and nail by the GAR.  The South began to share the May 30th date but tended to call their observances Memorial Days to differentiate them from the GAR’s Decoration Days. 

After World War I it became common to include the dead of that war—and later all wars—in the commemorations and the use of the term Memorial Day became more common even in the North.  But it was not Until 1967 the Congress officially changed the name.  

Moina Belle Michael started the tradition of selling poppies to support war refugees even before the entrance of the United States into World War I.  Later adopted by veteran groups not only from the US but the United Kingdom, Canada, and other Commonwealth countries.

In 1915 Georgian Moina Belle Michael, inspired by the poem In Flanders Fields by John McCrae conceived of the idea of making and selling paper flowers for the support of maimed soldiers.  When the U.S. entered the war in 1917 she began selling her poppies on Decoration Day to honor the dead of all wars.  She later donated proceeds to French and Belgian war orphans.  The poppy tradition spread to other Allied countries.  After the relief organization she had been donating to disbanded after the War, Michel approached the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who adopted Memorial Day poppy sales in 1922.  Two years later they inaugurated their annual Buddy Poppy sales.  Soon no respectable American would be seen on the streets on Memorial Day without a Poppy.  

The Color Guard at Union Cemetery in the annual Crystal Lake, Illinois Memorial Day ceremony, now mostly vets of the Gulf War and the seemingly endless conflicts since then.

These days the tradition of decorating soldier’s graves is kept alive by Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and veteran organizations who place small flags on the graves of veterans, not only at National Cemeteries, but in local graveyards as well.  Many cities and towns still hold parades, General Logan’s Order is read, prayers are uttered, politicians orate, high school bands play patriotic music, and sometimes straggling lines of elderly veterans fire volleys from rifles to salute of the flag. 

That’s the way it will be in my town, Crystal Lake, Illinois. 

Two Johnnys--Old Tunes for Memorial Weekend

  

Irish born Patrick Gilmore's band was the most popular ensemble of the 19th Century and recorded early Edison cylinders.  An Army veteran himself, Gilmore wrote and popularized When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again using a traditional Irish melody and drawing on a much darker version of the return home of a veteran.

Today we are going back to the origins of Decoration/Memorial Day.  When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again is one of the best known of all Civil War songs, but the song of anticipated triumph was something of a whitewash on an earlier and far grimmer Irish song.

The lyrics to When Johnny Comes Marching Home were written by the Irish-American bandleader Patrick Gilmore while he was serving as band master to the 24th Massachusetts Infantry in 1863.  The sheet music was published that year by Henry Tolman & Co. crediting words and music to Louis Lambert.  Although Gilmore was already a famed bandleader before the war, he thought that the French-sounding pseudonym might seem more romantic and sophisticated.  After the song’s initial wild success, he was proud to proclaim authorship.

                            The original sheet music acknowledged Patrick Gilmore's band but credited his alias Louis Lambert as the writer.

But he didn’t claim to write the music.  In 1883 he described the melody as:

…a musical waif which I happened to hear somebody humming in the early days of the rebellion, and taking a fancy to it, wrote it down, dressed it up, gave it a name, and rhymed it into usefulness for a special purpose suited to the times.

The tune Gilmore adapted was the Civil War drinking song Johnny Fill Up the Bowl.  The melody was even older than that, stretching back to the 17th Century ballad The Three Ravens.  

After the war Gilmore was asked to organize a musical victory celebration in New Orleans. That success emboldened him to undertake two major music festivals in Boston, the National Peace Jubilee in 1869 and the World’s Peace Jubilee and International Musical Festival in 1872. These featured monster orchestras of massed bands with the finest singers and instrumentalists including the only American appearance by the Waltz King Johann Strauss II.  They cemented Gilmore’s reputation as the leading musical figure of the age.  Coliseums were erected for the occasions, holding 60- and 120,000 persons.  Grateful Bostonians presented Gilmore with medals and cash, but in 1873 he moved to New York City where he built Gilmore’s Concert Garden, which became the first Madison Square Garden.  Then he took his band on acclaimed tours of Europe.

He was during his lifetime bigger than John Phillip Souza and lived long enough to make early Edison cylinder records.

Gilmore was back in America preparing an 1892 musical celebration of the quadricentennial of Christopher Columbus’ voyage, when he collapsed and died in St. Louis at age 64.

But Gilmore never acknowledged the influence of another song—Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye.  As an Irishmen from the Auld Sod, he must have known that one.

The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem.

Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye was written in the voice of a young lass made pregnant by a lad who ran away to be a soldier.  She sees him on his return from serving in a foreign war in a British Red Coat in the late 18th or early 19th Century.  It was a powerful anti-recruiting song especially popular with the Fenians.  Although presumed to be older it, was not published in London until 1867 and was credited to Joseph B. Geoghegan, a prolific songwriter and successful music hall performer.  It was set to the same melody as When Johnny Comes Marching Home because that was already a familiar tune on both sides of the Atlantic.  Most musical scholars believe it had an older folk origin, but some believe it was penned by Geohegan as a rebuke to triumphant bravado of Gilmore’s song. 

Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye was re-popularized when The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem recorded it in 1961.  During the Vietnam conflict it became an anti-war and anti-draft anthem.

 

Walking the Walk and Compassion for Campers Update for May 22 2026

 

Look for new opportunities for action, education, community, and solidarity in and around McHenry County here every week.  

                                                            Walking the Walk  

Vets Say No--No War No Cuts Memorial Day Ceremony and March sponsored by Vets for Peace, About Face, and other organizations on Monday, May 25 at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Chicago. Locally, Cary, Crystal Lake, McHenry, Woodstock and other municipalities will have parades and other observations to participate in.

Now two Pride Events!

Crystal Lake Pride Walk & Social  now sponsored by Crystal Lake Pride on Sunday, June 7 from 11 am-6 pm at Brink Street Market in Downtown Crystal Lakee.

Woodstock Pride Fest--June 13-14 Annual family-friendly events celebrating the LGBTQIA+ Community. Multiple special events.  Pride Parade and the Festival on the Square 11 am to 4 pm.

Ride/Walk to Leave a Light On--On and around Woodstock Square, Friday, June 19 7 pm.  Benefiting Break Crystal Lake Teen Center, Compassion for Campers, Community Connection for Youth, IMC--employment, education, health, and housing services, Jail Breakers, Lemonade & Advocate, Live4Lali, and Woodstock Pride.

Two Juneteenth celebrations:.

Honoring Legacy, Empowering the Future presented by McHenry County Now.  Thursday, June 18 at 5:30 pm at the Cary Public Library.  Register here.

The McHenry County Juneteenth Festival will be held on Saturday, June 20, from 3 to 5:30 pm on Woodstock Square Woodstock.

Friday, May 1 turned out to be the last C4C distribution at Community Resource Days at Willow Crystal Lake.  New leadership at Willow's home church announced a suspension of services at least until the Fall on May 24.  Our own resources are exhausted and we could not afford another on May 14.  

Sue Rekenthaler and Chaplain Dave Becker of Tree of Life UU Congregation are leading discussion on how to move forward Compassion for Campers's mission.

The good news is that that in cooperation of Nada Lunsford, Executive Director of Steven's Home we have been able to schedule a Stopgap resource event on Friday, May 29 from 11:30 am to 2 pm in the Hilltop Picknick Pavilion in Woodstock's Emrickson Park.  This will be a lot like C4C's early events featuring a lunch, time to share and visit, and distribute our camping gear and other supplies laid out for our guests to choose from.  We continue to search for other opportunities.  Look to this space for dates and locations.

C4C hopes to continue our service to the unhoused.  Until we find a new venue, we will not be able to accept material donations due to lack of storage space.  The best thing you can do is offer your critically needed financial support to get us through this emergency.  Money donations are always welcome at     https://tinyurl.com/3bz96axe.   Look for updates here.  Email compassionforcampers@treeoflifeuu.org .

Cyrill Demian, the Squeeze Box and Why Momma Doesn't Sleep

 

A French peasant in his smock and wooden sabots dances with his wife at village café in this early post card.

I’ve heard it called the second most dreaded instrument in the world, after the banjo.  But I am partial to the banjo.  I admit to having a harder time warming up to the accordion which I associate mostly with amateur musicians in local talent contests, and polka, a popular form of dance music to which I never took a shrine to even though my wife’s father Art Brady and her uncle Al Wilczynski played on Chicago radio in successful polka bands after World War II.

But I may have been harsh in my judgment.  It turns out that the instrument can be versatile and applied to a wide range of musical styles.  It also made making music affordable, portable, and easy to learn for the working poor of Europe, many of who participated in one of the great mass migrations in human history.

                                Although others may have preceded him, Cyrill Demian got the first patent on an accordion and is generally credited as the inventor.

We can credit—or blame—Cyrill Demian, an Armenian piano and organ maker who was living in Vienna, Austria.  On May 23, 1829 he was granted a patent on a new musical instrument that he called the accordion.  In his application papers he described it thusly:

Its appearance essentially consists of a little box with feathers of metal plates and bellows fixed to it, in such a way that it can easily be carried, and therefore traveling visitors to the country will appreciate the instrument….It is possible to perform marches, arias, melodies, even by an amateur of music with little practice, and to play the loveliest and most pleasant chords of 3, 4, 5 etc. voices after instruction.

Demian was not the first one to tinker with a portable instrument using free reeds which produce sound as air flows past them vibrating the reed in a frame.  Nor was he the first to use a bellows device to produce the airflow rather than direct wind from blowing in a tube or from air pushed from mouth-inflated bags.  Some Russian instrument makers had employed bellows boxes as early as 1820.  Christian Friedrich Buschmann is often credited with building the first such instrument in Berlin in 1822.

But it was Demian who obtained a patent and who went into commercial production on at least a modest scale.  The left hand on the bellows box musicians could press buttons regulating air flow over the reeds.  An entire chord could be produced by depressing a single key. There were only eight buttons in the model described in the patent, but he noted that more could be easily added. There were no buttons or keys on the right side, the player used the strength of the usually dominant arm to push and pull the bellows. Demian’s instrument was bisonoric—it could produce two different chords with the same key, one for each bellows direction.

Whoever has the best origin claims, the accordion was clearly an instrument whose time had come.  Its popularity spread like wildfire, especially in Russia and Eastern Europe, but soon in Italy, Germany, and France as well.  It seems like every maker made his “improvements.” Dozens of different button arrangements were designed.  Some were unisonic, producing the same notes or chords on the draw or the push.  In Eastern and Southern Europe, they were tuned to be able to play in minor keys.

By the mid 1830’s tens of thousands were being produced in centers across Europe.  They were sold mostly to amateur musicians or to the lowest grade of professional—those who played in cafés and taverns or on the street for tips.  The instruments were easy to learn and to become proficient on and perfect for playing by ear.  They were also loud and easily heard.  Most importantly they could be used to play traditional folk music of all sorts of people.  The accordion could assume the voice of a church organ, a violin, various stringed instruments, and horns.  And the player was free to sing along.  Some played single notes instead of chords so they could be used to play melody, often in combination with other accordions playing chords and harmonies.

Accordions reached London by 1832 where newspapers reviewed public performances poorly.  But they rapidly caught on with the public.  They were demonstrated in New York City in 1841.

In 1844 English inventor Charles Wheatstone came up with a compact instrument which could play both chords and melody in one squeezebox. He called it a concertina.  In different forms they became very popular in Italy as well as in the British islands and were favored by sailors who took them around the world.

But it was the political turmoil of the 1848 Revolutions that swept Europe, the Irish Famine, and decade of pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe that gave squeeze boxes of all types of legs.  Refugees and immigrants brought them wherever they went along with the familiar folk songs of home.  Many, of course came to the United States.

M. Hohner company of Germany mass produced early accordions like this which quickly swept Europe.

In the late 1800’s the piano accordion was perfected in Germany.  Larger and heavier than most other instruments, the right hand played melody on a piano keyboard of white and black keys while arrays of buttons on the left side played an array of chords in multiple keys.  The instrument became popular with professional pianists and organists who felt comfortable on it and who appreciated the musical possibilities it offered.  Honer, one of the principle German manufacturers, encouraged this and promoted its piano accordions as concert instruments and began publishing transcriptions of classical music for it.

One result of that was its use in formal ballroom dance styles which were being written by the finest composers in Europe.  These included waltzes but especially polkas.  This was, at the time, considered a major break from being rooted in folk music styles.  The dances, however, especially polkas, became very popular with Poles and Germans, many of whom immigrated to the United States.  Semi-trained emigrant and American musicians began writing their own lively Polkas that were far less refined than those played where dashing officers in comic opera uniforms swept the floor with belles in enormous dresses.  German immigrants brought these kinds of polkas and accordions to the Rio Grande Valley, where they became the basis of Tex-Mex Music and can be heard in Mariachi.

                                    Less than two decades after its introduction in England, this young Black boy was playing a concertina as a Union Army musician.

Eastern European Jews brought their special accordions along with traditional melodies and Klezmer music evolved, eventually incorporating jazz elements.  And speaking of jazz, in multicultural New Orleans Black musicians incorporated accordions into their street marching bands and with riffs from Spanish military music and the distinctive Acadian sound of the bayous.  Many early jazz bands included accordions.

Mother Maybelle Carter and the Carter Sisters on the Grand Ol' Opry with Anita Carter on accordion.

They began to encroach even on traditional fiddle, guitar, and banjo Appalachian and Southern folk music.  Mother Maybelle Carter sometimes played one, as did her daughter June.  Accordions were incorporated into many bands, even on the super traditionalist early years of the Grand Ol’ Opry.  Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys sometimes included an accordionist.

Piano accordion playing twins entertain at a mid-'60' USO show.

The so-called golden age of American accordion really took off with the huge popularity of Pietro Frosini and the two brothers Count Guido Deiro and Pietro Deiro who performed largely classical repertoire on the American concert and vaudeville stage in the early decades of the 20th Century along with Honer’s relentless promotion.  Music schools began offering classes and music stores offered the instruments on time.  Although not cheap, the instruments were less expensive than pianos or home organs, so parents enrolled their children in classes by the hundreds of thousands well into the 1950s.  Despite the heavy weight of piano accordions, they were especially popular among young women.  Accordion ensembles were common.  There were even accordion marching bands.

The Johnny Vednal Orchestra was a popular Cleveland polka band of the 1950's. Note the bandstand admonition.

Dance bands like Paul Whitman’s, Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians, and, of course, Lawrence Welk featured accordions, but so did more cutting-edge swing bands.  In the early years of rock & roll the accordion was alongside the chattering saxophones at the heart of several bands.

Buckwheat Zydeco introduced jazzy Cajun style music to a new generation in his folk festival appearances and roots music concerts.

But eventually the guitar triumphed as THE instrument of rock & roll, and the extended folk revival drew many young people to abandon the accordion, which was now seen as hopelessly square, in favor of six strings.  By the early 21st Century it had virtually disappeared from popular music except for novelty acts like Weird Al Yankovic and  Judy Tanuta. 

Today, partly because they have been out of favor for so long that they have become ironic, accordions are reappearing in cutting edge music.  They may even become hipster like little fedoras, skinny ties, and bushy beards.