Last November,
I wrote a story for the Sceneabout Nashville's fraught relationship with Thanksgiving. Because Nashville didn't learn to love Thanksgiving until the Rock City Guards threw a Thanksgiving Day Parade, the story was illustrated with the cover of the sheet music which reads "To the Members of the Rock City Guards Our March as Performed by the Rock City Guards Silver Band Composed by a High Private for the Piano."
I thought it would be cool to hear that march. So, I asked the TSLA if they had a copy of the sheet music. They wrote me back and said, "Which Rock City March? We have three." They were kind enough to get me copies of the three marches. And then I found a fourth march at the Library of Congress, which could be accessed digitally. So, I downloaded that puppy.
Then Kristin Whittlesey at Vanderbilt's Blair School of Music put me together with Ben Harris who, on Thursday afternoon, played the four marches for me. I had thought they might be the same song or sound similar, but they don't at all. And even odder, and more mysterious, since I didn't bother to check the illustration on my old story until I was writing that first paragraph five minutes ago, I didn't realize none of the four of these are the same music as illustrates my story.
Five different marches with basically the same name, one of which — probably the crucial one — remains unheard by me.
Which is not to say that my afternoon was a waste. No, people, I have heard and learned things, interesting thing, that I would like to share with you, my fellow history nerds.
The oldest song in the bunch I had was "Rock City Guards Quick Step as Played by 'Fentons' Silver Band." It was composed by F. Beler and arranged for the Piano by Geo. M. Taylor. Dedicated to the members of the Rock City Guards, it was copyrighted in 1860, making it pre-Civil War and at least possibly heard by the Rock City Guards. I couldn't find much about Beler and Taylor except that they had something of a career taking Confederate brass band music (a silver band is just a brass band with pretensions) and setting it to piano. But I did find a Fenton in the 1860 census here in Nashville—a Herschell [sic] Fenton who was a 30 year old music teacher born in Massachusetts. He seems like a likely candidate for the leader of Fenton's Silver band. (And, weirdly enough, he may be the same Herschel [sic] Fenton who went on to have a career as a minstrel and composer and who patented an electric banjo.) The song itself is very catchy and peppy. You can definitely tell it was originally intended for brass instruments. There are a lot of phrases played first on the right hand and then echoed in the bass line and it's easy to imagine two trumpeters playing back and forth or a trumpet and a trombone. It also has parts that have a very singable melody, which made me wonder if it might have, at some point, had words.
The next was the 1879 "Rock City March" by Carl S. Gungl which was "Respectfully inscribed to Company D, Rock City Guards, of Nashville, Tenn." To put it kindly, this was the least exciting of the four pieces. It sounded like something that might play in the background of a crowd scene or that you might be expect to dance to if your partner were particularly boring. But that doesn't keep this from being a strange piece of music. Gungl, who was born in Germany, was a member of the band that was attached to the 24th Infantry, which was one of the regiments of Buffalo Soldiers. Kind of puts a more ominous spin on that whole "Respectfully inscribed to a bunch of Confederates" part doesn't it?
Composed about the same time, 1880, was Lillie M. Hasslock's "Rock City Guard Grand March," which was my favorite of the four pieces. Which is not to say the best of the four pieces, but listening to it, one got the sense of Ms. Hasslock setting out to compose a piece of music that would allow her to run her fingers up and down every key on the piano. There's something audacious about it, like it's daring you not to applaud the accomplishment of any pianist who might play it. Here's where this one gets weird. There is no Lillie Hasslock living in the whole United States in 1880, let alone in Nashville. The two Hasslock families in the U.S. were Wilhelm and his three kids living in New York City and Herman and his wife, Clara, living in Nashville. Herman was from Germany and his wife was a first generation American whose father was also from Germany. There's also a Jennie Haslock living in Nashville, who's black, which I think probably rules her out (unless we're saying that a black woman in 1880 wrote an audacious song and then hid her identity first by changing her name and then by dedicating it to the last group you'd expect a black woman to be feeling nostalgic about). No, I'm fairly certain that this song came out of Herman and Clara's house because the only Lillie Hasslock who ever lived in Nashville at even remotely the right time was their daughter, born in 1892. (Their daughter, Augusta, has the same unusual middle name as me, in a weird coincidence.)
Perhaps it was a requirement that every German person who could play the piano and who came to know of the Rock City Guards had to write a march in their honor because in 1899, Franz J. Strahm composed and published the "Rock City March" dedicated to the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, who, thirty-five years on, were still the same men or the sons of men who had been in the Rock City Guard. Strahm's song also sounds like a genuine march. It's easy to imagine a brass band.... oh, excuse me... a silver band playing it. And it's nice. It sounds patriotic and Sousa-esque. If you heard a marching band playing it, you'd put your hand on your heart without quite knowing why. Strahm lived here in Nashville with his wife, son, daughter, and nephew. You'll be unsurprised to learn he was a music teacher.
I'd still like to hear the march the State Museum has, just to complete my collection. But I imagine it will also be completely different. It seems a shame that, in Music City, this music about our city, in most cases by people who lived here, has been forgotten. It'd be nice to have it all performed once and recorded, so that at least it can be put up on YouTube and where it can live on in posterity forever ruining searches for "Detroit Rock City."
