The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a three-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter:
Like smoke from the muskets at the Battle of Yorktown, music performed during the Revolutionary era vanished in the air. All music was live music; a given performance, perhaps with moments of brilliance, and flubbed notes as well, was heard once and never again. Not for another hundred years did humans take the first crude steps in physically capturing sound waves.
Virginia in the 18th century was overwhelmingly rural, and over vast stretches of the state, from the wave-lapped shores of the Chesapeake to the Appalachian ridgelines, the only music was the melodious song of birds. But wherever people were, there was music: “in the workplace, the military campsites, the quarters of the enslaved, the church, the theater, the ballroom and the home,” according to Colonial Williamsburg.
No one knows exactly what Patrick Henry’s voice sounded like, although subjective descriptions and partial texts of speeches remain. In a like manner, sheet music arrangements, newspaper advertisements and personal accounts allow us to reconstruct the music performed and enjoyed by Virginians, from the Eurocentric music of aristocrats like Robert Carter to the folk songs of the poor and enslaved.
More on the music of the revolution:
“Fife and drum signals served as ‘instant messaging on the battlefield’”
Cardinal 250 podcast with journalist Randy Walker on the music of the revolution.
In a 1778 letter, Thomas Jefferson lamented the incipient nation’s musical “state of deplorable barbarism” and claimed the only solution was importing musically trained servants from France. The normally astute Jefferson was exaggerating, perhaps out of his admitted passion for music.
Williamsburg, state capital until 1779, was the center of culture in Virginia. “Many Americans who in 1763 bought engravings at the Williamsburg Printer’s Office … were likely to play musical instruments,” Kenneth Silverman wrote in “A Cultural History of the American Revolution.”
“A society anxious to show refinement, containing many people with cultivated tastes, and lacking professional entertainment made do with at-home entertainment demanding some skill. Both sexes played the harpsichord and ‘spinet’ (really a small harpsichord). Otherwise, women favored training in voice and guitar, while men favored the violin and, especially, the flute — a term which seems to have covered both the transverse flute and the recorder.” 
In 1771 Purdie and Dixon, publishers of Williamsburg’s Virginia Gazette, advertised violins, flutes, method books and sheet music for harpsichord, violin and German flute by composers including Corelli and Vivaldi. Benjamin Bucktrout made and repaired spinets and harpsichords. Anne Neill, who came to the capital planning to operate a boarding school for girls, ran a store on Duke of Gloucester Street selling items including English guitars and German flutes. (The English guitar was a lute-like, 10-string instrument with a rounded shape.) Peter Pelham played the organ at Bruton Parish Church. Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor, once hired eight musicians for a ball, according to Amy Miller, performing arts supervisor at Colonial Williamsburg.
Away from the refined taste of Williamsburg, plantation houses on Tidewater’s rivers served as beacons of culture in the wilderness. Robert Bolling, poet, member of the House of Burgesses and descendent of John Rolfe and Pocahontas, composed an ode to his flute in 1763:
“WHILE exil’d in this solitude,
Dull seat of boors and planters rude,
With you, my Flute, in harmless play,
I cheat the tedious hours away…”
Families made music throughout the Colonies, but the level of artistry was perhaps highest in the South “because the scattered and isolated nature of southern plantations forced cultivated planters to build miniature private civilizations … providing for their entertainment in the same self-sufficient spirit by which they built bakehouses and foundries,” Silverman wrote.
“Patrick Henry played the violin, the lute, the flute, the harpsichord, and the piano forte [an early term for the piano which was just coming into widespread use]. Thomas Jefferson was a lavish and finicky collector of instruments and music … and a lover of ensemble playing.”
Robert Carter III in a flattering portrait. As a young man he was considered rough around the edges by some of his contemporaries. Courtesy of Thomas Hudson, Virginia Historical Society. 
Nomini Hall, the Westmoreland County seat of Robert Carter III, in a twentieth-century recreation. Located at the end of a poplar drive, it was described by visiting tutor Philip Vickers Fithian as “most romantic” and “truly elegant” with a beautiful view of the distant Potomac. Nomini Hall burned in 1850. Courtesy of R.E. Collins, Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division.
The most proficient and knowledgeable of the musical aristocrats may have been Robert Carter III of Nomini Hall in Westmoreland County. A grandson of Robert “King” Carter, the notorious land acquisitor, Carter III lacked his grandfather’s outward drive, instead concerning himself with music and religion.
Philip Vickers Fithian, tutor at Nomini, described Carter as having a dedication to practice, a good ear, delicate taste and an appreciation for fine instruments. He owned a harpsichord, pianoforte, guitar, violin, flutes and chamber organ and could play them all. Family concerts, including Handel, were part of life for Carter and his numerous progeny, 12 of whom reached adulthood.
Carter was one of a handful of Colonials to own and play the armonica, a peculiar instrument conceived by the fertile brain of Benjamin Franklin in 1761.
Anyone can get a musical tone from a wine glass by rubbing a wet finger around the edge. The pitch, low or high depends on how full the glass is. A set of correctly tuned glasses provides a complete scale. 
In London, Franklin saw a performance on the musical glasses. “He loved the sound, but decided he wanted to come up with a more convenient arrangement,” said William Zeitler, a California musician who is one of the world’s few professional armonica players.
Franklin’s design features 37 glasses, from large to small, threaded sideways on a spindle. A foot pedal keeps the assembly rotating. A moist finger applied to a spinning glass creates a sound Zeitler describes as “singing … ethereal, otherworldly.”
“Some people thought that the high-pitched, ethereal tones invoked the spirits of the dead, had magical powers, or drove listeners mad,” according to the Franklin Institute. A quiet instrument, suitable for chamber performances, the armonica was played by Carter in family concerts at Nomini.
The students at Nomini and other plantations were taught by traveling “professors.” In 1767, Landon Carter of Richmond County hired John Gualdo to teach guitar to his daughter Lucy. John Stadler traveled the Northern Neck teaching the Carter, Custis and Washington families at their homes, including Mount Vernon.
“Socially, the ‘Professor of Music’ stood above the actor, level perhaps with the small tradesman, but beneath the leading portrait painters,” Silverman wrote. 
Then, as now, musicians wore multiple hats to survive. Some doubled as church organists, sat in with local groups or hand-copied printed music for students’ use. Organist Peter Pelham of Bruton Parish Church, a busy man, played with the theater orchestra, offered evening concerts, gave private lessons, supervised the printing of treasury notes, and kept the keys to the gaol.
Gigging musicians of the 18th century suffered indignities all too familiar to modern performers. “Socializing at concerts irritated at least one New Yorker, who complained in 1764 that ‘nothing is heard during the whole performance, but laughing and talking very loud, squawling, overturning the benches’…” Silverman wrote.
Presumably, listeners behaved better in church pews. “The most prominent organists were those in the South, probably because the Anglicanism of the region had never provided the barrier against instrumental music that Congregationalism had erected in North America,” Silverman wrote. “Indeed, in 1763 the southern organists were probably the best trained and most skilled musicians in America.”
Music, Jefferson’s “favorite passion,” was employed in the cold-blooded marketing of human beings. Enslaved persons with musical skills brought higher prices. A 1767 ad in the Virginia Gazette offered a “servant” who played a “French horn” (without valves, which had not been invented yet). The horn was included in the sale. Enslaved musicians played the fiddle at dances. Sy Gilliat, an African-Virginian, was house fiddler for state balls in Williamsburg. 
Some enslaved persons brought skills and instruments from Africa. A traveler in 1775 saw a crude xylophone consisting of sticks laid across an open box; another saw enslaved people dancing to a three-string “banjor,” according to Silverman. Enslaved people kept alive the complex rhythms and call-and-response patterns of their ancestral home, which later played a defining role in the development of blues, jazz and rock and roll.
According to Encyclopedia Virginia, “the enslaved men and women at Jefferson’s Monticello likely had a rich sonic culture, although it would not have been recognized as such at the time.” Frederick Douglass wrote that slave songs “breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish.” Yet even this channel of self-expression could be turned against them by white masters, who sometimes required singing to project a false sense of contentment with their work. Silent slaves worried the masters. The enslaved workers got the last word by encoding references to freedom and escape in their songs.
Some owners worried that drumming could lead to insurrection, yet Isaac Jefferson, enslaved at Monticello, learned to play the drum around 1781 from another African-Virginian, Mat Anderson. 
People of all classes played the violin, an instrument that served equally well in plantation parlors and back-country dances. The average person knew many tunes by ear. In those pre-jukebox days, many a beefy forearm raised a mug to a drinking song, such as “I Am The King And Prince Of Drinkers”:
I am the king and prince of drinkers,
Ranting, roaring, rattling boys,
We despise your sullen thinkers,
And fill the tavern with our noise.
We sing and we roar,
And we drink and call for more,
And make more noise than twenty can…
On a more sober note, during the Revolution, songs were written to rally the Patriotic spirit. William Billing’s “Chester,” the “unofficial anthem of the American cause,” according to constitutionfacts.com, “encouraged the Patriots to be strong, because God was standing on their side against the British tyrants.”
Let tyrants shake their iron rod,
And Slav’ry clank her galling chains,
We fear them not, we trust in God,
New England’s God forever reigns.
“Yankee Doodle” predates the Revolutionary War and was sung by British soldiers to mock the Colonials as hicks and yokels. But after the British defeat at Concord, the Americans turned the tables, singing “Yankee Doodle” at the redcoats as they scurried back to Boston. Many sets of lyrics were composed to the “Yankee Doodle melody,” some praising Gen. Washington. Don Francisco, resident fifer and a history interpreter at Mount Vernon, recites these:
There was General Washington, upon a charging stallion,
Giving orders to his men, I guess there were a million.
Some sources say “Yankee Doodle” was played at the battle of Yorktown. As to whether the British played “The World Turned Upside Down” during Cornwallis’ surrender, the evidence is late and flimsy. “The plain truth is that no first-hand account of the surrender actually mentions what was being played by British musicians at the capitulation,” according to militaryhistorynow.com.
In 1791, Robert Carter, having converted to the teachings of Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, began the lengthy legal process of freeing more than 500 of his enslaved African Americans, “probably the largest emancipation by an individual person in the United States before 1860,” according to Encyclopedia Virginia. Nomini Hall, scene of intimate family concerts, burned in 1850.
While re-enactors still play the fife and drum calls that once rallied Patriots to the firing line, and classical musicians keep Handel alive, of the actual sounds heard at Yorktown, Concord, and Nomini Hall, not even echoes remain.
Listen to instrumental music from Colonial Williamsburg here: 
Listen to William Zeitler playing the armonica: 
Sources:
18th Century Songbook: https://www.americanrevolution.org/songs.php
“A Cultural History of the American Revolution,” by Kenneth Silverman, 1976
Drinking Songs: https://www.americanrevolution.org/songs1.php
Early American Music page at George Washington’s Mount Vernon: https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/colonial-music-institute/essays/early-american-music/
Glass Armonica at Franklin Institute: https://fi.edu/en/science-and-education/collection/benjamin-franklins-glass-armonica
Glass Armonica at Benjamin Franklin House: https://benjaminfranklinhouse.org/benjamin-franklin-and-the-glass-armonica/
“A Revolutionary Soundscape: Musical Reform and the Science of Sound in Early America, 1760-1840,” by Rebeccah Bechtold
Sound in Jefferson’s Virginia: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/sound-in-jeffersons-virginia/
William Zeitler, Glass Armonica Performer: https://www.williamzeitler.com/
The World Turned Upside Down: https://militaryhistorynow.com/2018/05/29/the-world-turned-upside-down-did-the-british-really-play-the-sardonic-melody-during-the-yorktown-surrender/
