"Come Home, Father" (also known as "Poor Benny", or "Father, Dear Father") is a temperance song written by Henry Clay Work in 1864. The song was eventually adopted as the anthem of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.
Background Work devoted himself to the temperance movement and expounded his Prohibitionist beliefs through song. The movement gained much traction after the Civil War's close as many moralistic fraternities, eminently, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, called for public education on the perils of alcohol. Drunkards were framed as sinful and culpable for the degeneration of lives throughout the country. Reform literature was the popular medium through which temperance was propagated, often taking the form of simple, sentimental and persuasive lyrics. The writer George W. Ewing notes: "Many, if not most, of the hymnbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contain at least two or three temperance hymns." It borrowed elements from contemporary literary realism, documenting the hardships of domestic life with emphasis on women's oppression at the hands of their husband's indulgent habits.Finson, The Voices That Are Gone, 52–55
Temperance reform music started to catch on in the 1830s, much in line with the rising influence of the movement as a whole. The 1870s saw a crest in the temperance movement, and around this time, the Women's Christian Temperance Union was established.Ewing, The Well-Tempered Lyre, 11–13 Lyrics
Analysis
Lyrical The song is a young girl's (named Mary) plea for her father, then trifling away his pay and time in a bar getting drunk, to return home while her brother is slowly dying.Museum of the Bible, "Come Home, Father" Work assigns two typical roles to the drunkard's children: one pleading, and the other dying.Ewing, The Well-Tempered Lyre, 68
Like many other temperance lyrics, "Come Home, Father" is overtly sentimental to persuade the audience of the vices of alcoholism but also realistic in tackling a pressing social issue. Such was its puissance that Work received hundreds of appreciative letters from social reformers. One Louisianan woman even wrote to him requesting a song targeted at inducing her husband to quit his extramarital affair and figuratively "return home."
Legacy
The song was published by Root & Cady, Work's parent publishing firm, in 1864.Howard, Our American Music, 267 However, the song is believed to have been first performed in 1858 as part of the Prohibitionist Broadway play Ten Nights in a Barroom, an adaptation of Timothy Shay Arthur's novel written four years prior.Waites, Illustrated Victorian Songbook, 34–36 "Come Home, Father" was also published in the United Kingdom, where it met great success.Birdseye, "America's Song Composers", 285 The New Grove Dictionary suggests that "Come Home, Father" is the most famous temperance song.Sadie & Tyrrell, New Grove Dictionary, 568
In a 1879 profile of the composer, George Birdseye labels the song as "the pioneer and pattern for all the many temperance pieces now in the market, not a few of which are very palpable imitations". According to him, it was one of Work's best-known compositions, second only to "Grandfather's Clock". Ewing describes "Come Home, Father" as one of two songs constituting "the apex of temperance verse".Ewing, The Well-Tempered Lyre, 16
In an 1898 editorial, Florine Thayer McCray writes: "... who has not sat breathless listening to the rare combination of pathos and harmony with which the changing cadences of human voices plead 'Hear the Sweet Voice of the Child' and felt how much more persuasive and fetching than any temperance sermon was this song... ."McCray, "About Henry Clay Work", 10 A hallmark of temperance meetings, "Come Home, Father" was adopted as the Women's Christian Temperance Union's theme tune. The song featured as an interlude in a production of Arthur's Ten Nights in a Barroom.
Work wrote other temperance songs after the war, including "Lillie of the Snowstorm" (1866), "King Bibler's Army" (1877), and "Shadows on the Floor" (1877), although none captured the fame of "Come Home, Father".Finson, The Voices That Are Gone, 57, 59
References
Bibliography
External links Original sheet music on the Levy Sheet Music Collection Recording by Jerry Silverman on the 1990 album The Songs of the American Civil War (1861-1865: Chants de la Guerre Sécession)