God Save America (Revolutionary War)
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 26/02/2021

Continuing Carl Sandburg's mini-tour of this tune, after the original God Save the King in 1745. Harold W. Thompson in Body, Boots and Britches: Folktales, Ballads and Speech from County New York writes:

"Evidently the soldiers of Washington loved God Save the King too well to give up its tune. The Orderly Books have the following American ditty to that melody, invented long before a Harvard man penned America."

The American Revolution Institute’s collection of more than fifty manuscript orderly books is one of the largest institutional holdings of orderly books in the United States. The majority of the orderly books are of American origin—for either Continental Army or local militia units..

It was ordered and directed that not only every Regiment, but every Company, keep an Orderly Book, "to which frequent recourse is to be had, it being expected that all standing orders be rigidly obeyed.” With this order Washington formalized the practice. . . .The orderly books reveal in vivid, often gritty detail the realities and hardships of camp life, with frequent injunctions about cleanliness, profanity, theft, treatment of civilians in the community and proper behavior in camp.

Historical figures honored in the lyrics include George Washington, Richard Mongomery (whose death on the Plains of Abraham is mentioned. and King Louis XVI of France.