"Old Kirb's Army": An 1864 Smith-Attributed Witness to "The Brass-Mounted Army" and the Problem of Vernacular Authorship

An extant family transcription, prepared by the present author years ago from a Xerox photocopy of handwritten pages attributed to Arthur Washington Smith, preserves a long Civil War army-complaint song dated 1864. A separately located 2008 family-history item states that handwritten sheets in Smith’s hand were found between the pages of his Family Bible and were submitted for inclusion in a Panola County history by Mrs. W. M. Redditt, Jr. Genealogical reconstruction now identifies that submitter as Elouise A. Smith Redditt, Smith’s great-granddaughter and an active researcher of the same Smith-family lines. That relationship makes family access to the Bible and papers substantially more plausible, while also showing why the Redditt statement is not independent evidence of authorship. Smith’s military record independently places him in Company C, 28th Texas Cavalry, whose regiment fought at Mansfield and Pleasant Hill in April 1864. Francis D. Allan’s 1874 Lone Star Ballads prints substantially the same song as “The Brass-Mounted Army,” attributing it anonymously to a man “of Col. A. Buchel’s Regiment.” The most informative evidence is textual rather than numerical attribution-counting. Smith’s transcription contains apparent corruptions relative to Allan (“brave mounted” for “brass-mounted” and a duplicated line in the army-school stanza), but it also preserves readings that are internally or traditionally stronger: “Old Kirb’s Army” where Allan has “our noble Army,” and “Buck and corn bread” where Allan has “beef and corn bread.” The “Kirb/Kerby” reading is independently present in a Missouri version collected in 1928, while “Buck” coheres with the song’s three-table ration joke and its later farewell to “old Buck.” This mixed profile argues that the Smith text is not a simple derivative of Allan’s 1874 printed recension and is better understood as an independent or lateral branch of the same wartime song complex. The surviving transcription also preserves no song title, only the lyric and a tune direction; that untitled state is compatible with local composition, oral acquisition, or manuscript fixing before the later print title “The Brass-Mounted Army” became attached to the song. It does not by itself prove Smith composed the lyric. The case instead clarifies how authorship, copying, oral circulation, manuscript transmission, and local adaptation can overlap in nineteenth-century vernacular song.