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Updated: May 31, 2025
Occasionally stentorian lungs roar unmelodious music-hall choruses that jar by contrast with sweeter strains, but sentiment prevails, and who can wonder if there are sometimes tears in the voices that sing "Swanee River" and "Home, Sweet Home," or if a listener's heart is deeply moved as he hears the words, "Mother come back from the Echoless Shore," sung amid such surroundings in the still nights of days that are hoarse with the booming of guns.
Apparently it passed muster, for he painstakingly stretched it upon the grass and taking a pair of cotton drawers turned again to the water. A blue-eyed Loudoun youth whistling "Swanee River" brought a brimming bucket from the stream that made the pool and poured it gleefully into the kettle. A Prince Edward man, lying chest downward, blew the fire, another lifted the turtle.
Then silence fell, and softly and sweetly over that silence, floated the tender, pathetic words of "Way down upon the Swanee River." You might have heard a pin drop. Even Sir Victor looked moved. For Edith, she sat scarcely breathing quivering with ecstasy.
Glad of the excuse to get a little further away, Freddie ran back to where Dinah sat on a long shiny bench. "Say, chile," she began, "you hear dat music ober dar? Well, a big fat lady jest jumped up and down on dat machine and it starts up and plays Swanee Ribber." "That's a weighing machine," Nan said with a laugh.
I don't know what they take me for, and I don't care, but as we'd better make friends with them suppose you sing them 'Home, Sweet Home, or the 'Swanee River. I shouldn't wonder if they consider our talking voices most horrible discords, so you might as well give them something different."
In those days there was raised up a man named Stephen Foster, who "heard in his soul the music of wonderful melodies," and we have been singing them ever since "'Way Down upon the Swanee Ribber," and "Old Kentucky Home," and "Nellie Gray," and the rest. Then Bradbury and Philip Phillips and many more of them began to write exactly the same kind of tunes for sacred words.
The true social event of that hour was the repast given by John March to Mr. Fair in Swanee Hotel, at which General Halliday, Captain Champion, and Dr. Coffin were on John's left, Ravenel sat at the foot of the board, and at John's right were Fair, in the place of honor, then Garnet, and then Shotwell in the seat appointed for Gamble, who had suddenly found he couldn't possibly stay.
One morning some six weeks after New Year's eve Garnet's carriage wheels dripped water and mud as his good horses dragged them slowly into the borders of Suez. The soft, moist winds of February were ruffling the turbid waters of Turkey Creek and the swollen flood of the Swanee.
O eh Johanna, have you no word of course, you know, the North's a mighty sizable place, and still it's just possible I might chance some day to meet up with eh eh however, it's aft' all so utterly improbable, that, really well, good-by!" A while later Johanna stopped at that familiar point which overlooked the valley of the Swanee and the slopes about Rosemont.
"Why not give 'em 'Down on the Swanee River'?" "All right," agreed the "parson," and therefore they were all presently singing at the one perennial "hymn" of the heart, universal in its application, sweetly religious in its humanism.
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