About "FROM THE FIELDS"
It started with GLORY ROAD. I had just finished reading Bruce Catton’s civil war trilogy and was so inspired by his poetic imagery and ability to tell the history of the war in short order that I penned GLORY ROAD. The song is a thumb print, a boot mark in the mud, a button off a long moldered uniform, left behind by the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia and it sings of the carnage left in the wake from the clashes between the two.
Around the same time that I wrote GLORY ROAD, I began to experience what were the emerging symptoms of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, a debilitating and fatal disease with no known cause or cure. I was told to get my affairs in order and make the most of whatever time I had left. Most people with the disease don’t survive more than 5 years after being diagnosed. So, that being the case, I decided to go see the places I had always wanted to see, and being a civil war buff, this naturally included battlefields galore.
In the summer of 2002, as part of a tour across America, I visited the Fredericksburg, Chancelorsville and Wilderness Battlefields in Virginia and I was appalled at the urban sprawl encroaching upon the battlefields there. Not exactly what I had imagined them to be.
Apparently; very little is considered sacred to urban developers and private land owners when dollar signs illuminate their souls. Where men gave there lives for freedom, where our nation purged itself in blood so it could be reborn again, those souls and sacred grounds are now being memorialized with pavement and strip malls, housing developments and golf courses.
One measure of the living is how they remember the dead.
It is a shameful testament to our greed and a desecration to our nation’s history, when mini-marts and laundry mats, car washes and fast food restaurants cover the land that should be preserved for future generations, as it was, so that they may as Joshua Chamberlain said “Visit the vision place of souls,” so that they might come to these “deathless” fields and woods, close their eyes and see what was. These songs and this project are the result of what I saw and what I heard…
“Some say if you listen…you can still here them moan”… the reason behind the music.
Both FROM THE FIELDS and VICKSBURG LAMENT were written in the spring of 2004 after returning from recording at Vicksburg National Military Park in Mississippi. FROM THE FIELDS came to me after reading Walt Whitman’s prose poems about the war. I had taken some photos of the National Cemetery there in Vicksburg while walking among the thousands of soldier graves. The images of that day along with Whitman’s words in my head lead me to pen the heart of the song
“Northern blood in Southern soil…and another “Unknown” for the years,”
Those words are the horrible truth of the serene terraces that overlook the river below.
VICKSBURG LAMENT is a song about the bitterness the South felt and still feels, towards the North
“These scars are wounds that time will never heal because a cog’s been busted up off the spinning wheel”
After a long brutal siege upon the city, Vicksburg was surrendered to the Union forces on the 4th of July in 1863. For years after the war, the stars and stripes were hauled down from the flag poles that flew them on Independence Day, and the residents of Vicksburg refused to celebrate what some still regard as a “Yankee Holiday.” The price to capture Vicksburg was paid in thousands of lives, both Northern and Southern, and today the city still struggles to overcome the ruin of it’s past.
On a cool clear moonlit night we recorded two traditional songs for the CD inside the Illinois Monument at Vicksburg National Military Park. LORENA, a period piece that was a favorite of soldiers, both North and South, and JOHNNY HAS GONE FOR SOLDIER, an old Irish Ballad with a haunting melody. With bats swirling around above our heads inside the monument’s interior, and by the light of a portable lantern, we sat captured in the moment, as Tad’s violin reverberated off the solid marble walls giving a ghostly mournful voice to the monument as he played. It was easy to close ones eyes and imagine those same songs being played across the battlefield during the war, and like the men that heard them then, have an ache in your heart and a longing for home.
A LETTER FROM SHILOH is based on the true story of a Union officer who on the eve of battle had a premonition of his death and wrote a farewell letter to his wife. Many soldiers often had these foreboding feelings (with good reason) before going into a big battle and too often they proved to be true, as in his case, killed in battle the next day as he expected.
Clara Barton is one of the most courageous women in American history. Her story is truly amazing. Both armies, Union and Confederate, were unprepared for the ghastly numbers of wounded that accumulated from the battles of the Civil War. Medical techniques were primitive, at best, and the general practice was to amputate arms and legs that had suffered serious wounds. Infection and disease ruled the day. The suffering of the unfortunates, mostly boys and young men alone and far from home was eased by Clara and her tireless efforts to comfort them. Whether she was distributing food to the sick and wounded, assisting doctors as they cut away on screaming patients or simply holding a young soldier in her arms as he drew his last breath, Clara selflessly devoted herself to “Her Boys” care. They called her the ANGEL OF THE BATTLEFIELD and after reading about her remarkable life, I understood why. She is responsible for the establishment of the National Cemetery at Andersonville, Georgia, and she is the founder of the National Red Cross Association.
One can only imagine the hellish nightmare of being incarcerated as a prisoner of war at ANDERSONVILLE or Camp Sumter as it was called by the Rebel army. It was constructed deep in the piney woods of southwest Georgia, far from the lines of battle, and far from the homes of those who were sent there. Captured Union soldiers were loaded like cattle into box cars and brought south by rail to their new home, a 16 acre open pen surrounded by a pine pole fence. There was no source of fresh water and no shelter from the elements. Food rations were such that men starved to death and disease of all sort plagued the hoards of men held there. Over 40,000 Union soldiers were sent to ANDERSONVILLE, and in its short existence as a Confederate stockade it claimed the lives of over 12,000 of those men. The song ANDERSONVILLE is the voice of ANDERSONVILLE itself…
“I’ll bring you in through the north…and take you out through the south,” and that is exactly what it did.
ANDERSONVILLE prison had two gates located on its western wall, one to the north, where new prisoners were brought in and one to the south, through which the dead were taken out for disposal. It will forever remain in American history, a place of unspeakable sadness and horror and serve as a remorseful reminder to us all…of mans inhumanity to man.
BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM and AMAZING GRACE are both songs that evoke the emotions felt by the country during the Civil War. SHILOH REPRISE is a short violin piece taken from the melody of a LETTER FROM SHILOH.
I have visited all the major fields of battle from the civil war. I walked across grounds where thousands of men bled and died and sensed the energy left in those places in varying degrees. My first visit to Gettysburg overwhelmed me with feelings that I was not prepared for.
By day the town and battlefields are crawling with tourists, snapping pictures and posing next to the monuments of the heroes who fought there long ago. I wanted no part of that. So I would wake up before dawn and set out to walk the fields before the crowds overwhelmed them, and in those hours of quiet, alone with my thoughts I visited the past. I wrote GETTYSBURG in my hotel room one morning after returning from Little Round Top with tears in my eyes, like a soldier who had just seen too much killing. I don’t know if my own battle for life played a role or not in that release of emotion…
I can only say that my spirit was overwhelmed with sadness that morning as I visited the battlefield and the ghosts of the bloody past still haunt the grounds of untimely death in and around Gettysburg. I felt welcomed there by unseen friends, long forgotten, and when I returned home from my travels that summer, I arranged to have the ashes of my body scattered there when I die.
“So tell my mama, and all of my kin…that I won’t be coming home again, because I hear the good lord calling… out my name, from the Devil’s Den”
A SOLDIERS DIARY was inspired by the journal writings of union soldier William Ray who served in the famous Iron Brigade. His simple words reflected the life of a soldier, long days of marching and drilling about camp, the camaraderie amongst the men, the anticipation of going into battle, the pitched emotions of men in the heat of battle and the heartache and loss of friends left in shallow graves, the privations of suffering and always, always, the constant longing for home.
In closing, I can’t convey how very special the recording of this music has been for me. I could have gone into a studio to record all the songs and gotten that “polished sound” to the music, but I didn’t. I chose to record them on the battlefields that they are written about, surrounded by the spirits of those who fought and died there, and that, is something you just don’t get (and can’t get) when recording in a studio.
The musicians that played along for these sessions (Scott, Tad and Tom) are my friends. They were a part of my vision, not because of their musical abilities, but because I wanted to share this life affirming journey with them…playing my songs by the light of a lantern, across the fields of the civil war.
In particular, I would like to thank David Duncan and the staff at the Civil War Preservation Trust for joining with me to make this grass roots effort a success.
Kyle Thompson