The Battle of New Orleans

June–July 1959

And now we come to the first nationalistic song on the list. It's also the first country-western song on the list – coincidence? It was apparently written by a high school history teacher, but the famous version is the massive (six weeks at #1) hit by Johnny Horton.



Funny this song should come up right now, because this Friday (January 8th) will be the 195th anniversary of the battle, which is often seen as the deciding American victory in the War of 1812. Of course, in the song, the details of the battle are not important. The Americans won, and the British ran away like little girls. However, it doesn't even purport to be a true account of the facts. It's deliberately mythologized and exaggerated – one of the later verses involves using an alligator as a cannon.

So it's all in good fun, but it raises the question: what did Americans of 1959 have against the British? This wasn't some flash-in-the-pan ditty – it was the number one single in America for a month and a half. The British had been our allies in both world wars, and most recently in the Korean war. Why the hostility at this particular time?

But maybe this has nothing to do with the U.K. Maybe people just wanted to remember a time when America won a war so triumphantly. The modern wars were American victories too, but they were increasingly bittersweet, being closer to the present, rather than history. And let's not forget that in the summer of '59, the U.S. had been funding a war in Vietnam for half a decade, and we would enter it ourselves in a short few months. Maybe people were scared enough that a nice little tale of red-blooded American victory seemed very appealing. But I'm betting this song didn't chart in England.

D