N.O.B. (1864) 🎹 by R.A.C. & J.C.M.

This "comic song" from 162 years ago has NEVER been recorded! It's about as obscure as it gets. You are literally the first to hear this in over a century and a half. Hard to describe how special that is! Please support my efforts to preserve our history:

This is as close as Grok would allow 😭

I've been unable to uncover the identity of "R.A.C." which is disappointing. He was likely a Kentucky-based lyricist. However, I'm almost certain I figured out J.C.M.! Jules C. Meininger (J.C.M.) wrote this song commemorating the death of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.

This extremely rare work can be found in the Duke University collection: Another version is on IMSLP: AFAIK, these are the only two places online that have preserved this work.

🤫😉

This is amazing! One of your best ever and a lot of virtuosity in that right hand. What I don't get is why Grant wasn't lumped in with the other Yankees? Why was he the cure?

Here's grok's interpretation. tldr: Grant's solution was military instead of political. Many Republicans with pro-North sentiment wanted to preserve the Union, but were increasingly annoyed with the "woke" rhetoric and pandering of the hardcore abolitionist Republicans who were infatuated with black people. Grant is portrayed as the “cure” because the 1864 song is anti-abolitionist satire from a border-state perspective that separates the hard-fighting Union general from the Radical politicians it attacks.The piece (“N.O.B.” / “Nigger on the Brain”), published in Louisville, Kentucky, mocks Northern abolitionists and Radical Republicans (Sumner, Phillips, Greeley and others) for what it frames as an obsessive mental “disease” focused on Black people and emancipation. It presents the war itself—specifically the battles under Grant’s command—as the antidote, labeling his efforts “Grant’s Anti-Nigger Pills” administered “on every battle plain.” Louisville was in a Union border state with strong Democratic, pro-slavery, and anti-Radical leanings. Many there (and Copperheads farther north) supported restoring the Union by military means while rejecting the social and political revolution of full emancipation and Black equality pushed by Radical Republicans. Grant, as the professional soldier directing the bloody Overland Campaign and Petersburg operations in 1864, fit a useful rhetorical role: the pragmatic “doctor” whose attrition warfare would end the conflict (and thus the agitation) rather than the ideologues driving racial policy. His public image at the time reinforced this contrast. He was the taciturn “Unconditional Surrender” general known for military results, not a vocal political crusader on race in the mold of the figures the song ridicules. The songwriters could therefore praise (or ironically invoke) his battlefield methods as the solution while condemning the broader Yankee political class.This is wartime propaganda of its moment, not a consistent ideological endorsement of Grant. In hindsight it is ironic—Grant later, as president, strongly enforced Reconstruction measures protecting Black rights—but the 1864 portrayal reflects the distinction some conservative Unionists and Democrats drew between winning the war and remaking Southern society.

Fascinating. The moderate who wasn't so moderate after all...

J.C.M. is almost certainly Julius Meininger, a Kentucky-based musician and song-writer active from the ~1850s-1890. He composed mostly instrumentals and piano works but also wrote popular songs. Notably, he wrote an entire Requiem for the memory of fallen Confederate soldiers.

If i space out a little it looks like this song is by RACISM lol 😂😂

you're not the first to notice this and it's absolute kino

Nice work Foundring! The context and subject matter is super interesting. As always, I enjoy the fact you play it as the artist intended. I totally feel the connection to the past with this one. Certified banger 👌🏿

Nob by Racism decades before Trotsky coined the term. Then Grant with his 'cure' that was as effective as heroin was for getting people off morphine. I love the layers here.

Wait... It was really written by R.A.C. and J.C.M??? I totally thought that was a tongue-in-cheek way of saying "racism" lmao

I hope you can do a 2026 version of this too. This evergreen classic needs some extra verses

Lol, those pills would sell like hotcakes, today!

Current pandemic

I think I would have liked the 1800s

Until the US Civil War was brewing, Ulysses Grant actually owned slaves.

Absolute banger!!!!!!

This song and Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush both share the same time signature!

thanks for the preemptive gwine, you know i'm here for my fix and woulda left shaking the runs are fun on this one comic song.

Ha Haha

Interesting. Height of the CW.

L.H.O.O.Q.