In 1863 a piece of sheet music was deposited in the Library of Congress under the name Louis Lambert, a pseudonym for the Irish-American bandleader Patrick Gilmore. Published by Henry Tolman and Company in Boston, the lyrics were reportedly written for his sister Annie, who was waiting for Union light artillery captain John O’Rourke. The words describe church bells, cheering villages, and laurel wreaths for returning soldiers, with no mention of victory or the enemy.

In 1883 Gilmore admitted in The Musical Herald that the melody was a tune he had heard someone humming. The same music had appeared months earlier as the drinking song Johnny Fill Up the Bowl, and historians link it to the Scottish John Anderson, My Jo and the English ballad The Three Ravens. The episode follows the tune from Union and Confederate campfires to Glenn Miller, Morton Gould’s American Salute, The Clash’s English Civil War, Guns N’ Roses, and the children’s song about ants marching one by one.

• Gilmore called the melody an orphan tune he had dressed up and rhymed into usefulness.
• A Gilmore publisher printed lyric slips telling buyers to sing the new words to the drinking song’s tune.
• Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye was not published until 1867 and was first sung to a different melody.
• Glenn Miller, Guy Lombardo, and the Andrews Sisters all recorded the tune during World War II.
• It appears in a 1979 Bollywood film and in the anime Black Lagoon and Girls und Panzer.