Ballots and Ballads: Singing the Presidency, 1840-1964

Music has played a significant role in presidential campaign pageantry since the earliest days of our nation’s history. From the 1840s to the 1930s, political parties distributed campaign songs in “songsters,” small booklets that typically provided lyrics and indicated the appropriate melody to go with them. The candidate’s supporters (and sometimes glee clubs) performed these satirical or didactic songs at political meetings, parades, and rallies. Although songsters were widely circulated and the songs were popular during a given campaign, the music faded into obscurity shortly after.

Since 2016, faculty and students at Georgia College & State University have organized a concert of campaign songs from this repertoire in connection with Constitution Week, an annual, week-long commemoration held in September to celebrate the signing of the US Constitution on September 17, 1787. “Ballots and Ballads,” will feature a lecture by Dana Gorzelany-Mostak, founder of Trax on the Trail, and a performance…