JINE THE CAVALRY

The theme-song of General . Stuart’s famous cavalry is attributed to the leader of his camp band and banjoist, Sam Sweeney. This signature song, the words possibly penned by Stuart himself, was “Jine the Cavalry”. Though the composer is uncertain, it is thought to have been adapted by Sweeney, who, after enlisting in the cavalry in 1862, soon came to the general’s attention and suddenly found himself a member of Stuart’s staff and his personal minstrel troupe. As Burke Davis wrote in his great biography of Stuart, “JEB Stuart - the Last Cavalier”, “Stuart must have more music.…there was always music. Sweeney on the banjo, Mulatto Bob on the bones, a couple of fiddlers […] Sweeney rode with Stuart on the outpost day and night. Stuart often sang and Sweeney plucked the strings behind him. . . . “ One of Stuart’s most trusted staff officers, Heros Von Borcke, recalled In 1866, in his Memoirs of the Confederate War for Independence, that Stuart was “…always the gayest and noisiest of