The Music and Folklore of “Good Old Rebel”
The cover art for the only known piece of sheet music of “Good Old Rebel” leaned into interpretations of the song’s apparent sincerity, although it also leaves room for the original humor. This undated publication features a bearded white man in civilian clothes, his only visible possessions fitting into a tattered haversack next to him on the ground. His face, resting on his hand in contemplation, reflects the lyrical dissatisfaction and anger. Any buyer of this music likely presumed that this character was the narrator of the song, an embittered veteran of the Civil War, possibly on his way home from some point of surrender. And yet, if they were inclined to see the rebel as a sore loser, then the illustration might well read as a comic figure, ridiculous in his stubbornness like a cartoonish hillbilly stereotype.12
Other publications used illustrations of the rebel to balance the vengeful with the absurd. In 1890, “Good Old Rebel” appeared in W. L. Fagan’s collection Southern War Songs: Camp-fire, Patriotic, and Sentimental. Fagan wrote that the pieces in his volume were “part of the history of the Lost Cause” and “necessary to the impartial historian in forming a correct estimate of the animus of the Southern people.” There, among the predictable songs like “Dixie,” was “Good Old Rebel,” credited to the initials J. R. T. without any mention of Randolph. Fagan also included a drawing that could be interpreted as a Black man between the verses with the caption “I’m a Good Old Rebel” printed underneath.13
Readers may have believed that a Black man sang “I hates the Freedmen’s Buro” without irony. Confederate reunions often featured former enslaved men who posed as Black Confederate veterans. As Kevin M. Levin has written, Lost Cause adherents created narratives about enslaved people who remained faithful to their white enslavers in a bid to sanitize the evils of slavery, expunge the institution’s centrality to secession, and establish “a model of deference to a new racial order” of Jim Crow segregation. At the same time, readers may have also taken the illustration as some new iteration of the joke, imagining these words from the mouth of a man whom the rebel would like to see returned to slavery. The possibility of multiple interpretations suggests that white readers could either laugh at the song’s narrator or seethe along with its malice, depending on one’s position.14
“Good Old Rebel” attracted more than Lost Cause promoters. In the early twentieth century, the song’s reputation as a genuine folk song garnered the attention of academics and journalists interested in documenting the nation’s vernacular culture. John Lomax believed the “Good Old Rebel” ruse and included the song as an anonymous creation in his collection Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. This version, published in 1910, dropped the reference to the Freedmen’s Bureau and added a verse about seeking postwar refuge in Mexico. Lomax failed to include where he found the song, but the rebel’s wish to “start for Mexico” reflected the fact that some former Confederates did flee to Mexico after their defeat to wait out the retribution for their rebellion.15
Four years after Lomax published his work, Collier’s magazine began running open calls for information about the nation’s folk songs. According to the April 4, 1914 edition, the magazine received a “flood of replies to an editorial request for … what we supposed was a real American ballad in which an unreconstructed rebel declares … he’d like to take his musket an’ go an’ fight some mo.'” Collier’s noted with a tone of disappointment that, based on the responses received from the request, the magazine determined the song was not a traditional ballad but, in fact, Innes Randolph’s creation.16
Letters from people claiming to know the song came from New Mexico, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, New York, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, and California. A respondent from Washington, DC, informed readers that he had recited the poem many times at both US and Confederate veterans’ meetings and learned the words from a Confederate veteran in the 1880s. He described the song as “a glimpse into the heart of the genuine old unrepentant, unreconstructed rebel … of whom there are only a few more left.” Collier’s chimed in with its belief that the song was “a very concrete reminder of passions long dead.” The writer likely meant that the “passions” of secession no longer threatened the stability of the union. But with Black Americans then experiencing the peak of the twentieth-century lynching epidemic and the formation of the Second Ku Klux Klan only a year away from this publication, Collier’s mistakenly conflated the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction with the end of resentment and violence. For the magazine, sectional reconciliation among white northerners and southerners equaled peace for everyone and erased the Black Americans who had earned their freedom by fighting the slaveholder’s regime.17