Perhaps most of the people who have listened this song (which Bob performed in several concerts from 1988 to 1994, and included in the album “World Gone Wrong”) never noticed that the lyrics talk about the famous Battle of Fredericksburg, fought at the end of 1862 during the American Civil War.
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In this battle, the Confederacy easily crushed part of the Union troops who, uselessly, tried to take the top of a hill and advanced through open field exposed to Confederate artillery and fire and, once reached the top, formed a line of shooting trying to annihilate a group of Southerners stationed behind a stone wall, who used a primitive strategy of rapid fire to liquidate the Union army. The result: A shameful defeat for the North.
Even a charge with bayonets would have been more effective than just standing before the enemy trying to eliminate it with muzzle-loading fire.
Scenes from the movie “Gods & Generals.
“Two Soldiers,” also known as “The Blue-Eyed Boston Boy,” is an old song from the Civil War, author presumably unknown. According to Lyle Lofgren, it likely is a story based on the battle of Fredericksburg in 1862. A blue-eyed boy and a tall dark man are fighting for the Union, and the boy asks the man to please tell his mother if he dies. He says he will do the same for the dark man. Both die in battle, and there is no one left to tell the boy’s mother what happened, nor his blue-eyed girl. The song was released on the 1993 album “World Gone Wrong.”
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