Whitman’s Band
The Poet and his Brooklyn Brass Boys
about the author
Russell Granger is a branding and marketing executive specializing in digital design and interactive media. He began focusing his research and archiving efforts on antebellum Brooklyn when family history pursuits led to the discovery of an association with Walt Whitman. Russell currently lives in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, just a few streets from several ancestral addresses from the 1830s.
What one eventually discovers in the pursuit of genealogy is that family history is inexorably entwined with all of history. Life itself is participatory, and no matter how marginal we feel our own lineages might be in the grand stories and surges of politics, art, or industry, the fact of the matter is that we were there. We are connected to all of it.
My interest in antebellum Brooklyn began as a genealogical pursuit. Because the permutations of family relationships had shrouded my paternal lineage in a bit of mystery, no one even knew that the Grangers were originally from Brooklyn. My detective work began in earnest when the Brooklyn directories of the 1840s and ‘50s revealed dozens of Granger names and addresses, but my passion was ignited when it started to seem quite likely that Walt Whitman had actually written about my family.
Early and Mary Granger (yes, my earliest American ancestor’s name was Early) had come over from Norfolk, England in 1830 with six children and produced four more in America. They apparently embraced their new home with zeal, because within a few years of their quotidian dispatch at the old ferry landing, they had managed to launch an enterprise that became known as the Brooklyn Brass Band.
Presentation at New York, 1853. New York Public Library Picture Collection Online.
Whitman’s ardor for the working classes was no doubt bound up in his affection for this band, which is evidenced by the precipitous spike in coverage the band received in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle during the two years of Whitman’s editorship. Unlike the merchants that made up New York’s famous Dodworth Band (also a family enterprise), Granger’s Band was a solid corps of tradesmen and laborers. The Grangers themselves were masons. They built Brooklyn’s churches, its townhouses, and even City Hall. But it was the family’s avocation that got them into the papers, and Walt Whitman was its chief chronicler.
There are few historical references to the enterprise, despite the fact that it was–along with the Boston and New York bands–one of the earliest such official outfits in the country. Its comparatively short lifespan is the likely reason for its obscurity. The original group lasted only until 1853, when 
bandleader William Granger’s untimely death from pneumonia ended the reign of the Granger name. Renowned cornetist Robert Stewart became the titular leader until the outfit served as the 14th Regiment Band in the Civil War, with the sons of several original band members as corps musicians.
That music was a prime inspiration for Whitman’s poetry is well known. His embrace of opera is familiar territory, but this was latent in the 1840s, when his musical tastes ran toward group singing, troubadours, and concert bands. Brass band music in particular is commonly acknowledged as an influence on Whitman’s work, but the identity of actual performing groups to which Whitman may have had access has only ever been speculated. One recent, quite fastidious biography identifies Dodworth’s band as a likely candidate for Whitman’s inspiration. Dodworth, who published music; Dodworth, whose educated sons engineered popular innovations for marching instruments; Dodworth, who made the history books–Dodworth, indeed! That I should feel a jolt of the rivalry that surely engaged my ancestors is reason enough to set the record straight: Historical records have so far failed to produce a single instance of Dodworth as the subject of any such attention from Whitman like the following, from an 1847 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
Of all that may be said of music––that inspiriting cheerer of the festive scene, and lightener of the cares of life––it is too often forgotten, (or rather it is not sufficiently realized, even by those who feel the pleasure,) that a fine brass band is capable of giving some of the sweetest developments of the divine art. Who that has listened to the noble melody of our crack Brooklyn corps of musicians, under the efficient leadership of Mr. William Granger, but has felt the truth of this? Indeed this band is among the best we ever heard: it seems to possess the idea of the “fitness of things” better than any other: it acts harmoniously indeed…..
Being so accustomed to the cultural tyranny of popular music today, it is intriguing to consider that the brass band of the early nineteenth century was the first instance of music played in organized public settings by common, working-class people. The magnetism of such an enterprise to a rapidly growing city must have been considerable indeed, particularly to its youth. The era’s romantic literature is rife with the allure of the military guardsman to the eligible young lady, and the young men were surely drawn to serve less by duty than by camaraderie and the promise of connubial conquest.
