“They found out a lot of details that even our family didn’t know. Confederate camps were filled with the tune of Dixie, an ode to life in the South before slavery broke the union apart. “They did so much research on the story, and they were so detailed about it,” Robert Harrison said. Before battle, Union soldiers might sing John Brown’s Body, in honor of the abolitionist who died fighting against slavery, or Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, or Marching through Georgia.
He asked to be buried with the dancing shoes he wore and the fiddle he played during those parties.
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The band’s song “Grancer Harrison” is set in southern Alabama, the final resting place for Harrison, one of the “13 ghosts of Alabama.” Harrison, who lost several sons in the Civil War, was known for throwing huge parties every full moon. “The landscape changes, other connections to the past disappear with development,” Harrison said. Yankee Doodles, grease your heels, Make ready to be running, For Dixie boys are near at hand, Surpassing you in cunning.
“Their whole principle is about writing music about things that are disappearing,” said Robert Harrison of Smyrna, Georgia, whose ancestor Grancer Harrison is the subject of one of the songs on the new album. Music, she said, is one way the stories of the war can be told and re-told, even if many of the battlefields in Atlanta, Nashville and other cities are now buried by neighborhoods and business districts. “We’re paving over a tragedy and we’re not remembering it,” Elkins said in a recent phone interview. Elkins recalls driving down Atlanta’s Moreland Avenue, across battlefields now covered by streets and stores, and hoping the stories of the Civil War were not lost to history. Many of the songs were inspired years ago, when Elkins and Granville Automatic vocalist Vanessa Olivarez lived in metro Atlanta. “Lanterns at Horseshoe Ridge,” for instance, recounts the night when mothers and daughters of soldiers used lanterns to search for their dead or dying loved ones near Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1863. Music was used extensively during the Civil War as a means of inspiring loyalty among the troops, and as a source of inspiration and motivation during marching.
The band’s goal is to capture the immense emotional and human imprints the war left not only on soldiers, but their loved ones, she said.