Description
It must’ve been the first weekend of August, 1990, at Fort Warren, Governor’s Island, in Boston Harbor, that our fledgling 2nd South Carolina String Band first played this waltz. For a number of years previous, our reenactment unit, Company I, 2nd SC Volunteer Infantry, had been participating with other such units, organized by a committee called the Union & Confederate Volunteers (UCV), to attend Living History presentations, open to the public at Fort Warren, then managed and maintained by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
This was both a military and civilian LH (Living History) event, so women and children were also represented by family members and others dressed in garments appropriate to the mid-19th century. Participants had arrived on Friday, and the event was well attended by reenactors portraying both military and civilian, Union and Confederate sides, as well as the general public who had traveled to the island via regularly scheduled ferry from Boston harbor. Once the last public ferry departed around 5pm, Saturday afternoon, the fort was ours.
My recollection was that at some point during Saturday, several reenactor ladies of various ages approached us and inquired if we would play for a dance that could be held in a large granite walled room once used as the bakery during the Civil War. Our band had only formed the year before at this event and there had been no dance then, nor at any previous UCV event at the fort. Our response was basically that we’d only be able to play the repertory we’d learned in the year since, and though we’d never played for a dance before, if they could manage to dance to what we knew how to play, then, sure, we’ll play for a dance !
A bit later, one of our members pointed out that we’d need to have a waltz we could play. As I recall, my brother Fred, our fiddler, said he knew one and played it for us. It was a pretty simple melody, we loved it and quickly learned it well enough to play that night and later included it on our first ‘album’ (audio-cassette tape), “Tenting Tonight”, August 1991. It was written and played by Woody Guthrie, in 1951. Fred said he knew it as the “Cowboy Waltz.” Of course, full-disclosure, that would not do for a collection of Civil War songs, so we eventually renamed it the “Cavalier’s Waltz.”
In this video, we are rehearsing it for the Grand Reenactor’s Ball, at the 150th Anniversary Reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 6, 2013, and later ‘morphing’ into the actual dance that evening, where we’ve apparently recovered enough energy to ‘up’ the tempo slightly.