Early One Morning in the Month of July

DESCRIPTION: "Early one morning in the month of July We finished our crops and laid them all by." The singers depart from their girls. They exhort their patriots to fight hard: "We're bound to whip the Yankees, we'll do it or die." They praise Lee and insult Butler.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1923 (Brown)
KEYWORDS: Civilwar farming separation
FOUND IN: US(SE)
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Brown/Belden/Hudson-FrankCBrownCollectionNCFolklore3 377, "Early One Morning in the Month of July" (1 text)
Brown/Schinhan-FrankCBrownCollectionNCFolklore5 377, "Early One Morning in the Month of July" (1 tune plus a text excerpt)
Roud #11749
NOTES [164 words]: This is, perhaps, a reference to recruiting some (Civil War) regiment or company: Companies usually formed when an eminent person (usually a man who hoped to be an officer) signed up all the willing men in an area to form a unit.
What unit, though, cannot be told from Brown's fragment. The natural assumption is that the mention of July refers to July 1861, but this renders the reference to Lee and Butler mysterious; Lee did not assume command of the Army of Northern Virginia until 1862, and by that time Benjamin Butler was in New Orleans.
The closest Lee and Butler came to crossing swords was in the 1864 campaign, when Butler commanded the Army of the James which miserably failed to capture Petersburg by surprise. But by that time, the Confederacy had every man it could find under arms -- by means of a draft. No summer soldiering!
All that being the case, I rather suspect that this was a home front song, not one sung by soldiers in one of the major Confederate armies. - RBW
Last updated in version 5.0
File: Br3377

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