"Come Home, Father" (also known as "Poor Benny", or "Father, Dear Father") is a temperance song written by Henry Clay Work in 1864. The song was eventually adopted as the anthem of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union.
Work devoted himself to the temperance movement, "[expressing] his passionate convictions about Prohibition" through music. [1] The movement gained much traction after the Civil War's close as many moralistic fraternities, eminently, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, called for public education on the perils of alcohol. Drunkards were framed as sinful and culpable for the degeneration of lives throughout the country. [2] "Reform literature" was the popular medium through which temperance was propagated, often taking the form of simple, sentimental and persuasive lyrics. Biographer George W. Ewing notes: "Many, if not most, of the hymnbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contain at least two or three temperance hymns." [3] It borrowed elements from contemporary literary realism, documenting the hardships of domestic life with emphasis on women's oppression at the hands of their husband's indulgent habits. [4]
Temperance reform music started to catch on in the 1830s, much in line with the rising influence of the movement as a whole. The 1870s saw a crest in the temperance movement, and around this time, the Women's Christian Temperance Union was established. [5]
Father, dear father, come home with me now,
The clock in the steeple strikes one;
You said you were coming right home from the shop
As soon as your day's work was done;
Our fire has gone out, our house is all dark,
And mother's been watching since tea,
With poor brother Benny so sick in her arms
And no one to help her but me,
Come home! come home! come home!
Please father, dear father, come home.
Chorus:
Hear the sweet voice of the child,
Which the night-winds repeat as they roam;
Oh who could resist this most plaintive of prayers
"Please father, dear father, come home."
Father, dear father, come home with me now,
The clock in the steeple strikes two;
The night has grown colder, and Benny is worse
But he has been calling for you:
Indeed he is worse, ma says he will die—Perhaps before morning shall dawn;
And this is the message she sent me to bring—
"Come quickly, or he will be gone."
Come home! come home! come home!
Please father, dear father, come home.
Father, dear father, come home with me now,
The clock in the steeple strikes three;
The house is so lonely, the hours are so long,
For poor weeping mother and me;
Yes, we are alone, poor Benny is dead,
And gone with the angels of light;
And these were the very last words that he said—
"I want to kiss papa good-night."
Come home! come home! come home!
Please father, dear father, come home. [6]
The song is a young girl's (named Mary) plea for her father, then trifling away his pay and time in a bar getting drunk, to return home while her brother is slowly dying. [7] Work assigns two typical roles to the drunkard's children: one pleading, and the other dying. [8]
Like many other temperance lyrics, "Come Home, Father" is overtly sentimental to persuade the audience of the vices of alcoholism but also realistic in tackling a pressing social issue. [9] Such was its puissance that Work received hundreds of appreciative letters from social reformers. One Louisianan woman even wrote to him requesting a song targeted at inducing her husband to quit his extramarital affair and figuratively "return home." [10]
The song was published by Root & Cady, Work's parent publishing firm, in 1864. [11] However, the song is believed to have been first performed in 1858 as part of the Broadway play, Ten Nights in a Barroom. [12] "Come Home, Father" was also published in the United Kingdom, where it met great success. [13]
In a 1879 profile of the composer, George Birdseye labels the song as "the pioneer and pattern for all the many temperance pieces now in the market, not a few of which are very palpable imitations." [13] According to him, it was one of Work's best-known compositions, second only to "Grandfather's Clock". [13] Ewing describes "Come Home, Father" as one of two songs constituting "the apex of temperance verse." [14]
In an 1898 New Haven Journal-Courier editorial, Florine Thayer McCray writes: "[...] who has not sat breathless listening to the rare combination of pathos and harmony with which the changing cadences of human voices plead 'Hear the Sweet Voice of the Child' [the chorus] and felt how much more persuasive and fetching than any temperance sermon was this song [...]" [15] A hallmark of temperance meetings, "Come Home, Father" was adopted as the Women's Christian Temperance Union's theme tune. [16] The song featured as an interlude in a production of Timothy Shay Arthur's Prohibitionist play Ten Nights in a Barroom . [17]
Work wrote other temperance songs after the war, including "Lillie of the Snowstorm" (1866), [18] "King Bibler's Army" (1877), [19] and "Shadows on the Floor" (1877), although none captured the fame of "Come Home, Father". [18]
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