Rebels in Washington

The season's final concert of Washington's National Gallery Orchestra last week was no place for cold-blooded Yankees. The west court of the gallery rang with the words and music of such songs as The Bonnie Blue Flag, The Conquered Banner, the sentimental love song Lorena, and for a finale, Dixie, with a 40-voice chorus giving the rebel yell.

The idea for the demonstration came from the musings of Conductor-Composer Richard Bales, a Virginian himself, who has long regretted that so much music associated with the Confederacy -- Dixie excepted--has fallen out of memory. From libraries, and with the help of friends, Bales resurrected some 125 old Southern songs, all piano versions. Weeding through them, he selected ten solidly representative tunes, orchestrated them for sighing fiddles and haunting horns, and strung them together in a cantata which he called The Confederacy. The premiere brought out the rebels of the Washington area in full force.

After an opening march, a soprano sang the mournful ballad. All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight, which was sung by both sides in the 1860s. Then came the chorus in The Bonnie Blue Flag, with the stirring lines rousingly flung out:

And rather than submit to shame,

To die we would prefer,

So cheer for the Bonnie Blue Flag

That bears a single star!

As it went its 60-minute way, alternating solos and choruses. The Confederacy recited the slow, nostalgic Lorena--a Northern song, curiously enough (Chicago, 1857), but later a Southern favorite:

The years creep slowly by, Lorena,

The snow is on the grass again;

The sun's low down the sky, Lorena,

The frost gleams where the flowers have been . . .

And the fast, high-spirited Yellow Rose of Texas:

You may talk about your dearest May,

And sing of Rosalee,

But the Yellow Rose of Texas

Beats the Belles of Tennessee.

At the windup, there was a reading of General Lee's farewell order to the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox, and for the finish, a roof-raising Dixie with a 16-bar rebel yell. When it was over, there was hardly a dry eye in the house.

Getting the yell right was a special problem. Bales, unsure of style and pitch, hopped down to Richmond for a talk with a man who could be expected to know: the late historian Douglas Southall Freeman. Freeman gladly explained that the trick of the yell is the "cumulative effect," voice after voice, piercing the eardrums. Then Freeman threw back his head and blasted out with an earsplitting "Ooooo-eeeeeeeee!"* Says Bales with awe: "Once having heard it, you never forget it."

* A variation from the yell set down by one on-the-spot expert, Harvie Dew of the 9th Virginia Cavalry, who described it: "Woh-who-ey! who-ey! who-ey! Woh-who-ey! who-ey! etc. . . . Sound the first syllable . . . short and low, and the second . . . with a very hish and prolonged note deflecting upon the third syllable."

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