Henry Clay Work

Henry Clay Work (October 1, 1832 – June 8, 1884) was an American composer and songwriter.

Work was born in Middletown, Connecticut, to Alanson and Amelia (Forbes) Work. His father opposed slavery, and Work was himself an active abolitionist and Union supporter. His family's home became a stop on the Underground Railroad, assisting runaway slaves to freedom in Canada, for which his father was once imprisoned.

Work was self-taught in music. By the time he was 23, he worked as a printer in Chicago, specializing in setting musical type. He allegedly composed in his head as he worked, without a piano, using the noise of the machinery as an inspiration. His first published song was "We Are Coming, Sister Mary", which eventually became a staple in Christy's Minstrels shows.

A bust of Henry Clay Work near his birthplace in Middletown, Connecticut.

Work composed much of his best material during the Civil War. In 1862 he published "Kingdom Coming" using his own lyrics in a "Blackface" Negro dialect. The song satirizes a Southern planter who attempts to flee Union troops by hiding his "'dreadful' tan" face among those of his own slaves.[5] The 'Kingdom Coming' referred to in the song is the seventh or Jubilee Year, Deuteronomy 15.1, when all debts should be canceled, a concept of great significance to Negro slaves. This use of slave dialect tended to limit the appeal of Work's works and make them frowned upon today. However, "Kingdom Coming" appeared in the Jerome Kern show "Good Morning, Dearie" on Broadway in 1921, and was heard in the background in the 1944 Judy Garland film "Meet Me in St. Louis". His 1862 novelty song "Grafted Into the Army" (rather than 'Drafted') illustrates another humorous device Work used frequently, pseudo-Irish malapropisms. It was followed in 1863 by "Babylon is Fallen" ("Don't you see the black clouds risin' ober yonder"), "The Song of a Thousand Years", and "God Save the Nation". His 1864 effort "Wake Nicodemus" was popular in minstrel shows. "Poor Kitty Popcorn, or The Soldier’s Pet" (1866) blends melodrama and whimsy, in a way that may have been possible only after the close of the war.

In 1865 he wrote his greatest hit, "Marching Through Georgia", inspired by Sherman's march to the sea at the end of the previous year. Thanks to its lively melody, the song was immensely popular, its million sheet-music sales being unprecedented. It is a cheerful marching song and has since been pressed into service many times, including by Princeton University as a football fight song and by Japanese bands entering Port Arthur in 1905 after their victory in the Russo-Japanese War[6](presumably a tribute to Theodore Roosevelt's role in peace negotiations.) Timothy Shay Arthur's play Ten Nights in a Barroom, had Work's 1864 "Come Home, Father", a dirgesome song bemoaning the demon drink: a child pleads with his father to join his mother as she grieves for a dying infant brother. It was always sung at Temperance Meetings. "Who Shall Rule This American Nation?" (1866) reveals Work's Abolitionist credentials as his speaker asks, "if not those who are honest and loyal?" as opposed to "They who murdered the innocent Freedmen"

Continuing in the sentimental balladry popular during the day, Work had significant post-Civil War success with the "The Lost Letter", "When the 'Evening Star' Went Down" (1866), "Agnes By the River" (1868) and "The Ship That Never Returned"—a tune reused in the "Wreck of the Old 97" and "MTA". Light humor was another mainstay: "The Buckskin Bag of Gold" (1869) tells of a young lady tricked by a handsome railroad con-man, and " Take Them Away - They’ll Drive Me Crazy!" (1871) is the plea of an elderly gentleman who loses all self-restraint when confronted by attractive young females.

A massive hit was "My Grandfather's Clock", published in 1876, which was introduced by Sam Lucas in Hartford, Connecticut, and again secured more than a million sales of the sheet music, along with popularizing the phrase "grandfather clock" to describe a longcase clock." The clock in question was actually owned by Work's father-in-law, Daniel Parker, who lived with his family in Greenwich ("green-witch") Village, Massachusetts, one of the villages later taken to make way for the Quabbin Reservoir. Work wrote the song while sitting by a millpond, during a lunch break from his job at the nearby Walker's Sawmill. The clock is still in the Parker family.

Perhaps among his best songs is one published just before his final year: "The Silver Horn" (1883) which tells of a dying old man who was once a bugler in the Civil War. As he relives his glory days, he brings the instrument to his mouth, and "At the touch of his lips the bugle spoke."

Henry Clay Work's headstone in Spring Grove Cemetery, Hartford, CT

By 1880 Work was living in New York City, giving his occupation as a musician. He died in Hartford two years later at the age of 51. He was survived by his wife, Sarah Parker Work, and one of their four children.

Henry Clay Work was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970. He was a distant cousin to Frances Work, a great-grandmother of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Among the best-known of Henry Clay Work's 75 compositions are:

• "Kingdom Coming" (c. 1863)
• "Come Home, Father" (1864)
• "Wake Nicodemus" (1864)
• "Marching Through Georgia" (1865)
• "Who Shall Rule This American Nation?" (1866)

"The Ship That Never Returned" (1868)

• "Crossing the Grand Sierras" (1870)
• "My Grandfather's Clock" (1876)
• "The Silver Horn" (1883)