“Soldier’s Joy, 1864” is Guy Clark’s, not a traditional lyric, and it is built on the old fiddle tune rather than borrowed from it — the melody is plainly related, which is the point of the title. It appeared on The Dark (Sugar Hill, 2002), two tracks after “Magnolia Wind,” and belongs to the loose cycle of songs Clark wrote with Shawn Camp around Sis Draper, a fiddling woman from Camp’s Arkansas childhood who arrived, as Camp tells it, with a beehive hairdo and a fiddle in a coffin case. Camp returned to the whole cycle in 2025 on The Ghost of Sis Draper.
The title is the joke and the wound at once. “Soldier’s joy” was Civil War slang for the mixture of whiskey, beer and morphine given to men in field hospitals, and the tune had carried that association for a century before Clark wrote a lyric that says it outright. The song is narrated by a wounded man: he thinks a snake has bitten him, comes to in a wagon of ten more wounded, five of them dead by the time they reach the tent. A surgeon works on his leg with a carving knife and then a hacksaw. The chorus is what he asks for between operations — “Give me some of that Soldier’s Joy, you know what I mean, I don’t want to hurt no more” — and by the last verse the request has become a habit he expects to carry to the grave.
Clark recorded it himself in 2002; Roy Schneider cut a version in 2012 and Shawn Camp in 2025.
