Page:Hold the Fort! (Scheips 1971) low resolution.pdf/36

30 song to use today, anyhow, because people outside the United States might misunderstand the reference in the first line to "comrades." Yet, the old gospel song remained alive and refused to disappear from the scene. The very next year, speaking on the morning radio program "Look to this Day," the Reverend Mr. Robert Sutty, pastor of the Temple Baptist Church, Washington, D.C, took as part of his text a quotation from the chorus. Indeed, as recently as 1966 the Gospel Publishing House of Springfield, Missouri, published Ramona Crabtree's choral arrangement of "Hold the Fort" in the "Melody Choral Series." It was not a best seller, "just an old time song loved by a lot of people"; even so, its sales were "average for choral arrangements."

Such is the history of the 100-year-old gospel song as sacred music. But "Hold the Fort" attained such popularity that it inevitably achieved a secular life as well.

  In the years 1876 to 1884 (and very possibly at other times) "Hold the Fort" was adapted to the secular if not downright profane uses of presidential politics. In the campaigns of those years in which Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, and James G. Blaine ran on the Republican ticket against, respectively, Samuel J. Tilden, Winfield Scott Hancock, and Grover Cleveland, there were at least eight Republican campaign songs inspired by and sung to the tune of "Hold the Fort." These songs, of course, celebrated not only the presidential candidates but also their running mates—William A. Wheeler, Chester A. Arthur, and John A. Logan. Their rhyming and originality often left much to be desired and there was not much subtlety in them, but they had a tune that could be used by evangelists of the hustings as well as of the cloth. One of them, vintage 1876, was James Nicholson's "Our Watchword," the third verse and refrain of which ran:

