(b New York, 12 July 1801; d Baltimore, 7 Oct 1890). American composer and music teacher, son of James Hewitt. After apprenticeships in various trades in New York and Boston, he secured a commission to the military academy at West Point in 1818, but resigned in 1822. He received his only known instruction in music from the academy’s bandmaster, Richard Willis. In 1823 Hewitt accompanied his father on a theatrical tour of the Southeast which ended unsuccessfully when a fire destroyed the theatre in Augusta, Georgia. He established himself as a music teacher beginning a long and largely itinerant career as a teacher and journalist spent almost entirely in the Southeast.
Hewitt returned to Boston in 1827. After his father’s death later that year, he married Estelle Magnin of New York; the couple had seven children. Their eldest son, Horatio Dawes Hewitt (b Baltimore, 9 March 1829; d Baltimore, 23 Dec 1894), operated music stores in New Orleans, Baltimore, and possibly St Louis. He composed several dances for the piano and a three-act opera, The Pearl of Granada. From 1828 to 1840 John Hill Hewitt was in Baltimore, where he won a poetry competition in which Edgar Allen Poe also took part. After more years of travelling, including a stay in Washington, DC, where he gave music lessons to President Tyler’s daughter Alice, Hewitt and his family settled at the Chesapeake Female College near Hampton, Virginia, in 1848. Hewitt remained there until his wife’s death in 1859.
In 1863 Hewitt married Mary Alethia Smith. After spending the remainder of the Civil War in Augusta and Savannah, Georgia, and the immediate postwar years at various colleges in Virginia, he moved his family to Baltimore in about 1874.
Hewitt was a prolific writer and composer. He is best remembered as a composer of songs, most of which were published; the most popular, The Minstrel’s Return’d from the War, was also his first attempt at composition. Hamm (1983) considers All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight (1863) – ‘powerful, dramatic, antiwar’ – to be the best song of Hewitt’s output. Hewitt’s prose, poetry and plays remain largely unpublished; four volumes of his autobiographical writings are in Emory University Library, Atlanta, and a fifth is in the New York Public Library.
(selective list)
texts by Hewitt unless otherwise stated
MSS in US-ATu
Edition:J.H. Hewitt: the Collected Works, ed. N.L. Orr and L.W. Bertrand (New York, 1994)
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Flora’s Festival (juvenile cant.), 4vv, pf, Baltimore, 1 May 1838 (Washington, DC, 1846) |
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Jeptha (orat), 1845, lib. (Baltimore, 1845), MS vs |
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The Fairy Bridal (cant., after Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream), 4 solo vv, 4vv, pf (Boston, n.d. [1845]) |
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The Revellers (juvenile temperance orat) (Baltimore, 1848) |
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The Musical Enthusiast (operetta) (Boston, 1872) |
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Other dramatic works, incl. King Linkum the First (burletta), Augusta, GA, 23 Feb 1863, ed. R. Barksdale (Atlanta, 1947); The Marquis in Petticoats, The Veteran |
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Almost 300 songs, incl. The minstrel’s return’d from the war (Boston and New York, ?1828); Rock me to sleep, mother (F. Percy) (Baltimore, c1861); All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight (L. Fontaine) (Richmond, VA, 1863) |
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c20 pf pieces |
W.C. Winden: The Life and Music Theatre Work of John Hill Hewitt (diss., U. of Illinois, 1972)
C. Hamm: Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York, 1979)
F.W. Hoogerwerf: John Hill Hewitt: Sources and Bibliography (Atlanta, GA, 1981)
C. Hamm: Music in the New World (New York, 1983)
N. Tawa: A Music for the Millions (New York, 1984)
JOHN W. WAGNER