The band is commemorating the anniversary by putting on a pair of concerts that will be used as the basis for a live CD. The 2nd South Carolina String Band, one of the oldest and best-known groups of Civil War musicians, has assembled here in a town where the Ewers brothers once both lived, to celebrate their twentieth season of reenacting. “You take off your shoes before you jump on a trampoline.” “What’s the difference between a banjo and a trampoline?” he asks. It’s called ‘Too Ning.’”įred has much fun with the audience at his brother’s expense. “He’ll play this melody several times this evening. “It’s an ancient Chinese melody,” Ewers’s brother Fred, one of the band’s two fiddle players and the on-stage maestro, will later explain to the audience. On the stage, Ewers tunes his second banjo, emblazoned with a South Carolina palmetto tree, to the accompaniment of the hall’s eager chatter and the click of hard-soled boots on laminate floor. Women with long hoop skirts swoosh down the side aisles. The concert hall, an American Legion hall on East Middle Street in Gettysburg, fills to capacity. They pause the conversation so someone can grab a snapshot-Confederates in front of Old Glory-then pick up where they left off. To the side of the stage, two other members of the 2nd South Carolina String Band stand in front of a 34-star American flag and chat with a pair of reenactors who’ve come for the concert. He plucks, twists a knob to get the instrument in tune, then plucks again.
His slouch hat sits at a rakish angle, and a pair of blue tassels, so faded that they look gray, dangle over the broad brim. Joe Ewers stands on the stage and plucks one of the strings on his five-string banjo. Matchless Organization: Nonsurgeon Employees of the Surgeon General’s Office.Matchless Organization: Medical Officers in the Regular Confederate Army.The Bonds of War: Imprisoned Members of the 96th Illinois.The Bonds of War: Mother of the Regiment.The Bonds of War: New Flag for 96th Illinois.The Bonds of War: Edward and Nancy Murray home.
The Bonds of War: Edward Murray’s Pension Application.The Delicious If: MacKinlay Kantor’s If the South Had Won the Civil War and Alternative History.
God and Generals: A Conversation with Jeff Shaara.Turning Points of the American Civil War.The Summer of ’63: Vicksburg and Tullahoma.
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