Songs of the American Revolution
- August 12, 2026: The Rifleman at Bennington to the British Granadiers
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You can use this popular melody for The Rifleman’s Song at Bennington.
Sunday is the 199th anniversary of the 1777 Battle of Bennington. I marked the 198th last year, in the run-up to 2026, with Samuel B. Young’s 1819 commemoration speech. I first ran across the battle, however, unknowingly: from a song called “The Rifle” in Jerry Silverman’s How to Play the Guitar. It’s a rousing song and a striking demonstration of how Americans have always celebrated new technologies. And that’s what I meant to write about last year, before I discovered that the song was more commonly attributed to the Battle of Bennington.
So for me, at least, it’s fitting to bookend my Sestercentennial Year with Bennington, by finally getting a period melody down for this wonderful song. This is the end of the Sestercentennial celebrations on my blog, although not in my personal life.
This is also the official end of the Padgett Sunday Supper Club’s centennial-ish recipes. Some will continue throughout the year, and beyond. There are so many wonderful recipes in those centennial and bicentennial books, as well as in American Cookery and Thomas Jefferson’s Cook Book. But they’ll be there because they’re great recipes, not because they’re great centennial recipes.
Some of the founders were very much techies. I already wrote about how Jefferson incorporated technology into his kitchen. But one of the most relevant new technologies during the revolution was the rifle. Rifled barrels had much greater range than smoothbore muskets, at least twice—and up to three times—the range of older long guns. The rifle’s precision shooting was very suited to the tactics of America’s Indian-style wilderness fighters such as Francis Marion.
- 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.
- 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.
Corey’s album is a combination of short introductions and epilogues about the American Revolution, surrounding songs that highlighted various people and events. One of the songs on the album is The Swamp Fox. The name is evocative—and similar to that of the Marvel Comics superheroes I’d recently started reading about from the local grocery store’s spinning racks.
I didn’t yet own a cassette recorder, so I never recorded the album. I just kept checking it out whenever I felt like listening to it again, until I couldn’t find it anymore. It took almost fifty years to acquire a copy of my own. It is a marvelous album.
- In Lexington
- The center of revolt against the King
- The colonists were trying hard to bring
- An independent way of life to this, their promised land
- It was there, in Lexington, they made their stand.
“The American war for Independence had begun.”
Corey sings of Lexington, and then of Bunker Hill, on into both the signing that we’re celebrating this year and the entire campaign of 1776, two hundred and fifty years ago. Then it’s off to Brandywine and Saratoga and into The Swamp Fox before Corey wraps up the Revolution by counting the cost.
In Corey’s telling, the Swamp Fox stands at the pivot of the Revolution.
- 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.
- 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)”.
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.