Songs of the American Revolution
- May 20, 2026: Flowers o’er the Tory grave: Disney’s Francis Marion
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Logo for Disney’s Swamp Fox miniseries on Walt Disney Presents. The background represents “Frontierland” at the newly-created Disneyland.
If poetry and music were the main pop culture mediums of the nineteenth century, television was the pop culture medium of the second half of the twentieth. Francis Marion was in on television from the beginning. He had a television series, sort of, in the fifties. Walt Disney Presents: The Swamp Fox was based on the Robert D. Bass book Swamp Fox: The life and campaigns of General Francis Marion.
- Battle of Bennington
- Upside Down Yorktown
- Cherry Valley Massacre
- Battle of the Kegs
- Sestercentennial Cookery
- The New Colossus
- Irish potato pie
- Sing of Marion’s Men
- Disney’s Marion ⬅︎
- Monticello Meal
- Riflemen of Bennington
The book was published in 1959 and Disney immediately made it into an eight episode miniseries for Walt Disney Presents. Francis Marion was played by Leslie Nielson, more famous today for his comedic roles. Marion’s girlfriend and later wife, Mary Videau, was initially played by Joy Page—more famous for a minor but pivotal role in the earlier Casablanca.
- May 6, 2026: Mock the Wind and Sing of Marion’s Men
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May 12, Tuesday, is the anniversary of the capture of Fort Motte by Patriot forces under General Francis Marion and Lieutenant Colonel “Light-Horse” Harry Lee in 1781. “Fort” Motte was in fact a plantation mansion commandeered by the British a year earlier. The siege, which began on May 8, is famous not for the siege itself nor for the famous military figures who took part but for the patriotism of its real owner, Mrs. Rebecca Brewton Motte. Mrs. Motte famously supplied the exotic arrows used to set the mansion on fire and drive the British out.
The siege was otherwise a fairly standard military operation, not at all the backwoods guerrilla warfare that General Marion was famous for. I’ve been fascinated by Marion ever since hearing a song about him in a library record back during the celebration surrounding the Bicentennial. We lived a few blocks from the local library, and I checked out Dallas Corey’s 1973 The History of the American Revolution several times to listen to it on our record player.
A Sestercentennial Year
- Battle of Bennington
- Upside Down Yorktown
- Cherry Valley Massacre
- Battle of the Kegs
- Sestercentennial Cookery
- The New Colossus
- Irish potato pie
- Sing of Marion’s Men ⬅︎
- Disney’s Marion
- Monticello Meal
- Riflemen of Bennington
- December 31, 2025: The Battle of the Kegs
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The Battle of the Kegs, as depicted in John Gilmary Shea’s 1872 A Child’s History of the United States.
You may know Francis Hopkinson as one of the less-prominent signers of the Declaration of Independence. But he was much more than a Founder. He was also a poet. I’ve included his wonderful “For a Muse of Fire” in The Padgett Sunday Supper Club Sestercentennial Cookery, which will be the next post in this series. And— he wasn’t just a poet: he was also a satirical poet. This Sunday, January 5, marks the 248th anniversary of the battle that provided him his finest hour as a writer. If there’s a second thing that Hopkinson is remembered for, it is his darkly humorous account of The Battle of the Kegs in rhyme.
- Battle of Bennington
- Upside Down Yorktown
- Cherry Valley Massacre
- Battle of the Kegs ⬅︎
- Sestercentennial Cookery
- The New Colossus
- Irish potato pie
- Sing of Marion’s Men
- Disney’s Marion
- Monticello Meal
- Riflemen of Bennington
- October 15, 2025: The World Turned Upside Down
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And of course I used the piano script from 42 Astounding Scripts to create a MIDI file and then GarageBand to make a slideshow of the Revolution.
One of the most enduring stories about the American Revolution is that of Lord Cornwallis’s surrender to George Washington at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. It was the beginning of the end of the revolution; all that was left were long negotiations for a peace treaty. As the British Army left the field on October 19, their band showed their confusion and dejection at having been beaten by a bunch of wild colonial boys by playing the then-popular song “The World Turned Upside Down (PDF File, 560.9 KB)”.
A Sestercentennial Year
- Battle of Bennington
- Upside Down Yorktown ⬅︎
- Cherry Valley Massacre
- Battle of the Kegs
- Sestercentennial Cookery
- The New Colossus
- Irish potato pie
- Sing of Marion’s Men
- Disney’s Marion
- Monticello Meal
- Riflemen of Bennington
More American Revolution
- Flowers o’er the Tory grave: Disney’s Francis Marion
- Walt Disney’s The Swamp Fox was an influential take on Francis Marion’s life—very possibly an influence on Mel Gibson’s The Patriot, too.
- Mock the Wind and Sing of Marion’s Men
- “In Lexington, the center of revolt against the King…” One of the most modern figures of the American Revolution was a slaveholder and Indian fighter with a superhero name.
- The Battle of the Kegs
- The Battle of the Kegs took place on January 5 or 6, 1778. Soon after, Francis Hopkinson wrote this wonderful account of the debacle, including very personal details about the British General in charge!
- Cherry Valley: A Massacre of the Revolution
- Mel Gibson’s The Patriot is disparaged for the ruthlessness it portrays among the British. But such barbarity certainly did exist. One massacre by British troops is still remembered by the residents of Cherry Valley, New York.
- The World Turned Upside Down
- The legend of the surrender of Lord Cornwallis to Washington at Yorktown says that the band played “The World Turned Upside Down”. It probably didn’t. But we’re going to print the legend anyway.
- Two more pages with the topic American Revolution, and other related pages
More folk music
- The World Turned Upside Down
- The legend of the surrender of Lord Cornwallis to Washington at Yorktown says that the band played “The World Turned Upside Down”. It probably didn’t. But we’re going to print the legend anyway.
More music history
- Let mortal tongues awake
- Samuel Francis Smith’s America—more commonly known as “My Country, ’Tis of Thee”— is short, direct, and a wonderful hymn to God as the soul of liberty. It’s a perfect hymn for the Fourth of July. It’s also very easy to play using the piano script from 42 Astounding Scripts.