ere is something for the Southern Boys, and a great rarity: “ephemera” of any sort (as the very name reveals) are short-lived objects—but (like everything Confederate, then and now) MUCH less southern ephemera has survived to our day. We are delighted to be able to offer this example which also serves as an object lesson in how these sheets of paper can be eloquent witnesses to the world of their birth.

It is impossible to determine whether this is a Confederate ballad or a production of Northern sympathizers, but I favor the latter as there is no indication of who printed the sheet nor where it can be purchased—both rather unusual features of these items of commerce. I believe the evidence suggests it was produced in the occupied City of Baltimore (probably during the early days of the War) not only because of its anonymity but also by the choice of the woodcut which adorns it. Thanks to the kind assistance of good friend Mr. Rob’t Frost of Portsmouth N-H, the vessel depicted in the cut can be identified as a close-hauled Baltimore schooner. Mr. Frost, a practical sailor, offers this appraisal:

 “The woodcut shows the schooner sailing fair, before the wind. A schooner with its fore-and-aft rig can can goad a square rigged enemy into a chase; once committed to pursuit, it's a longer process for a square rigger to 'wear ship' (i.e., move into or past the wind direction). The schooner, on the other hand, can tack relatively quickly. This is a tremendous advantage in either laying guns or scooting away after damage has been inflicted on the enemy."

Whatever direction the wind is coming from, a square-rigger couldn’t tack into it as much as a schooner could…so there’s a little braggadocio to be inferred from the woodcut.” To preserve the integrity of this sheet's anonymity, examples will not be marked with the P. M'Dermott stamp.

I believe it is also possible, based on internal evidence, to suggest some further possibilities concerning its origin. Ballad sheets are almost universally poorly printed—they were cheap items mostly sold to the lower classes—and the printers catering to this trade were interested in getting a piece out the door as cheaply and as quickly as possible. All the faults of bad printing are commonly found on these sheets: failure to follow copy and poor composition; broken, mismatched, and reversed type; unwanted impressions from printing furniture (such as the screwhead seen at the upper left corner of the woodcut on this ballad); uneven inking; and bad paper in the wrong condition for the press which produces muddy and uneven impressions. This sheet has those, to be sure, but it also strikes me as exhibiting unusual traits (such as the remarkably out-of-square and poorly  spaced typographic border) which make me wonder if it may not have been run off by apprentices (a group of young males proverbial for both their hot-headedness and hijinks) who crept back into their print-house one night to run it off.

We are still in the realm of guesswork once we turn to performance. The limping meter of the poetry (whose quality is not much different that of the printing which preserved it) and absence of a designated tune led me originally to believe that it was intended to be read rather than sung. Further thought and experimentation (prompted by the piece’s self-definition as a “song”) has led me to change my opinion, however. Although it will take a bit of creativity to fit the words, I would suggest “Joe Bowers” as a likely candidate for singing the piece; the faint but I believe genuine whiff of allusion to the Lamentations of Jeremiah over the fall of Jerusalem (which would have been far more suggestive to mid-19C people) also suggests that a hymn tune might be a likely candidate.

The principal use of ballad sheets was, of course, to learn and/or sing songs from; then as now, not everyone had a good memory. Ballad sheets allowed purchasers to either learn a song in the privacy of their own chambers (or tent) and then spring it on the rest of the crowd at an after-dinner social gathering, the oyster rooms, or around the camp-fire; or to just sing the song with sheet in hand to help a defective memory (in the Irish tradition, when a singer gets stuck in the middle of a song, we say "there's a hole in the ballad"!).
But these sheets also had an important secondary use: they were cheap decor. While especially true of illustrated ballads (like this one), even sheets with nothing but words were pasted or pinned up in public and private rooms as mirthful or improving decoration. Mr. M'Dermott has seen ballad sheets pasted inside trunk lids, books, instrument cases, portfolios and such; doubtless they were stuck up in winter quarters, and they might well have been pasted inside the odd knapsack. Other locations for this item, folded up, are in the corner of a knapsack, stuck into the sweatband of your cap or hat, or in the wallet. They have served as impromptu letter paper when nothing better was to hand, and can again. While these ballad sheets are quintessential ephemera—cheap when bought, and not likely to survive very long—Mr. M'Dermott has been lucky enough over the years to see two examples of what mid-19C purchasers did to keep their prized clutch of ballads handy: one sheaf was pinned with a straight pin along the long side; another had been sewn together with thread, like a side-sewn pamphlet: a  home-made "song book."