“The Two Soldiers” (also “The Last Fierce Charge,” “The Battle of Gettysburg”) is a traditional American Civil War ballad, first published as a poem titled “At Fredericksburg” in Harper’s Weekly on February 7, 1863. The lyric draws on the December 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg, where Lee’s Confederate army repulsed Burnside’s Union assault with extraordinary loss; the song’s narrative — two soldier-friends agreeing that whichever survives the day will write home to the other’s mother and sweetheart — is a literary parlour ballad that subsequently entered oral tradition.
Alan and Elizabeth Lomax recorded a Kentucky version in 1937 from Munroe Gevedon of West Liberty, with Gevedon’s children Cathlyn and Bert accompanying on guitar and banjo. The Lomax field recording — cataloged in Malcolm Laws’s Native American Balladry with collected texts from Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Utah, and Nova Scotia — established the song’s place in the broader American folk-revival repertoire.
Bob Dylan recorded it on his 1993 album World Gone Wrong, and Norman Blake and Tony Rice’s 1990 reading on their second Rounder duo album brought the song into the modern flatpicking-and-vocal repertoire. Their slow tempo and harmonically open arrangement let the lyric’s plain narrative carry the recording without underlining. It works as a slow vocal feature in C or D with a strong harmony slot on the chorus refrain.
