Marching Song (play)
Marching Song is a historical drama about abolitionist John Brown, written in 1932 by Orson Welles and Roger Hill. It is known for a narrative device in which a journalist pieces together a man’s life from conflicting memories—a method Welles would later use in Citizen Kane.
The play was never professionally produced, but an abridged world-premiere was staged on June 7–8, 1950 at the Woodstock Opera House in Woodstock, Illinois, as a benefit for Woodstock Hospital by the Todd School for Boys.
In 1932, two months before his 17th birthday, Welles returned to Chicago from Europe and his time with the Gate Theatre in Dublin. He asked his former teacher and friend, Roger Hill, to help him write a biographical play about John Brown and his 1859 slave revolt. In May they visited Harper’s Ferry and other historic sites; in August Welles wrote at a summer home in Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin. Hill says he wrote only a few scenes and that Welles edited and rewrote the rest. Hill recalls writing the first draft of the first act to get the project started.
The Todd School production shortened the four-hour play to about two hours for the 1950 performances. A copy of the typescript, including Welles’s sketches and set instructions, is held by the Lilly Library at Indiana University.
In 1985, Hill told Welles that he had found his own copy and thought it still worth publication. Rowman & Littlefield later announced it would publish the play in August 2019, accompanied by two essays by Hill’s grandson, Todd Tarbox, to place the work in historical context and examine Welles’s progressive politics.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 14:19 (CET).