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A few years ago I read a very interesting book about the early evolution of baseball. Unfortunately, I can't remember the title. One point in the book is that the Civil War did a lot to popularize the sport. Before the war, people mostly were born, lived and died in about the same place. When the war hit, masses of people -- both soldiers and presumably displaced civilians (though this was not discussed in the book, as I remember) -- were uprooted and moved around. They brought their cultures with them and soon meshed it with the cultures they found. This, the author suggests, was the beginning of America as a mass culture. We entered the war as a group of disparate states and emerged as a nation.
Ending slavery was the great positive of the war, of course. Another positive, albeit far behind, was this cross-pollination. Keep in mind that the nature of war is that brief periods of terror are separated by almost endless down time, and baseball filled much of the vacuum. Different forms of baseball--some similar to today's game and some far differerent--became an obsession and thrived. (A side note is that we ended up with today's rules because the Cincinnati team used a version close to them and were the first to actual publish a rule book. No DH, though.)
The same must have been true of music. I have no academic proof of this, but it seems inevitable that troops from different regions coming together and playing music during those long boring days (keep in mind that absolutely nothing happened during winter) must have stimulated collective creativity and pushed American music. Note that When Johnny Comes Marching Home (above) clearly is an Irish tune. This likely was the reality for each army individually and for the music of one influencing that of the other.
The poignant lyrics to When Johnny Comes Marching Home are here. Below is The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Previously, The Daily Music Break featured Jay Ungar's beautiful Ashokan Farewell, which was featured in Ken Burns' The Civil War.