John Hill Hewitt

Son of James Hewitt, John Hill Hewitt was a music teacher as well as a composer and is best known as a composer of popular songs.

Image: John Hill Hewitt, 1852, public domain

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About

Born in New York and educated in New York and Boston, Hewitt began a military education at West Point in 1818, leaving in 1822. It was there that he received his only instruction in music, from the bandmaster Richard Willis.

In 1823, Hewitt joined his father for a theatrical tour of the Southeast, which ended early due to a theater fire in Georgia. Hewitt enjoyed life in the Southeast and began teaching music lessons in Georgia, where remained until 1827, when he returned to Boston, married and began a family.

Hewitt also had a career as a journalist and poet. In fact, while John Hill Hewitt was in Baltimore between 1828 and 1840, he won a poetry competition which Edgar Allan Poe also entered. Well-established as a music teacher by the 1840s, Hewitt continued to travel, taking his family with him, and even gave music lessons to President Tyler’s daughter Alice in 1848.

After his first wife’s death in 1859, Hewitt remarried and spent the Civil War in Georgia. After the Civil War, he and his family moved to Virginia and then Baltimore, as Hewitt took positions at various colleges.

Hewitt wrote his first musical composition in 1828 (“The Minstrel’s Return’d From the War”), and many consider his best song to be “All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight.”

–Christie Finn

Related Information

Songs

Recordings

Robert E. Lee Remembered

(Daniel Decatur Emmett, Stephen Foster and John Hill Hewitt)

1998

The Civil War

(Henry T. Burleigh, Daniel Decatur Emmett, Stephen Foster, John Hill Hewitt, Abraham Lincoln, George Frederick Root, Henry Russell, Joseph Philbrick Webster and Henry Clay Work)

1993

Books

Sheet Music

All Quiet along the Potomac Tonight

Composer(s): John Hill Hewitt

Buy via Sheet Music Plus

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