‘Civil War Christmas’ combines music, history lessons
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Bill Kistler, left, and Harry Fisher have been performing Civil War-era music together for 24 years.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Acoustic Shadows of the Blue and Gray: from left, Mike Fisher, Mark Kinan, Bill Kistler and Harry Fisher
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Fisher on banjo
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Full house at Peters Township Public Library
Members of the Acoustic Shadows of the Blue and Gray are among the musicians who encourage audience participation.
“We do encourage you to sing along,” guitarist Bill Kistler told the band’s audience at Peters Township Public Library. “These songs are 150 years old, so we know you know them.”
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Mark Kinan plays the jawbone.
The quartet proceeded to regale a packed house with “Music from a Civil War Christmas,” a Dec. 9 program mixing holiday favorites with songs that were popular around the time the Blue and Gray were representing the North and South on 1860s battlefields.
Joining Kistler, a California resident, are leader Harry Fisher of Dawson on banjo, his nephew Mike Fisher of Monessen on guitar and mandolin, and Mark Kinan of West Mifflin on multiple instruments, including playing percussion on a donkey’s jawbone.
“It’s been in use as a musical instrument since 1600 or so,” Kinan explained. “They made every use of the animal.”
The afternoon was full of such nuggets, as the musicians provided mini-history lessons in between many of their selections. For example, they made sure to pay tribute to Stephen Collins Foster (1826-64), the Lawrenceville native – he’s buried there in Allegheny Cemetery – whose compositions have retained their popularity for a century and a half.
Among the Foster songs performed by the Acoustic Shadows were the perennial favorites “De Camptown Races” and “Ring Ring the Banjo.” As for the latter, Harry Fisher gave a nod to gold-toothed banjo picker Uncle Dave Macon (1870-1952) for bringing the tune to a wide 20th-century audience.
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Mike Fisher on guitar
Another Foster composition, “Nelly Bly,” perhaps would appear to refer to the Armstrong County-born journalist who gained fame for her exploits in the 1800s, most notably traveling around the world in fewer than 80 days.
Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, though, was born in 1864, 14 years after the song was published. And she spelled her nom de plume “Nellie.”
The Civil War, of course, concluded in 1865, leaving a death toll of more than half a million Americans. Some sobering songs of the era reflected the plight of the soldiers.
“They would lie awake at night, knowing that there was a battle coming the next morning, and everything was really much out of their control,” Kistler said. “Sometimes they would write letters home to loved ones, and this is a song about one of those letters, of a soldier writing home to his mother, telling her that he won’t know what happens tomorrow, and describing what could happen and his prayers and his love for his mother.”
The band proceeded to perform George F. Root’s “Just Before the Battle, Mother.”
On a lighter note were the Christmas favorites that were popular back in the day, including “Away In a Manger,” “Jolly Old St. Nicholas” and the show-closing “Jingle Bells.”
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Harry Funk / The Almanac
Bill Kistler on guitar
The California University of Pennsylvania Civil War Roundtable co-sponsored the event with the library, bringing the Acoustic Shadows of the Blue and Gray to Peters Township for the second straight holiday season.
And besides singing along, audience members had plenty of reason to smile, such as reacting to this story by Kistler:
“When I was at work on Friday, I had a couple of my co-workers say that they were listening to this next song and they couldn’t get it out of their head. It’s called ‘Goober Peas,’ and they asked me what a goober pea was. Of course, it’s a peanut,” he explained.
“Harry and I have been together for 24 years, and we did re-enactments and we’d always get pelted with peanuts. So I decided to change the name of the song to ‘Hundred-dollar Bills.’
“It didn’t work.”
For more information about Peters Township Public Library, visit ptlibrary.org.