Work, Henry Clay (1832–1884)

US printer and composer. He became nationally known, both for his temperance song ‘Come Home, Father’ (1864), and then for his stirring Civil War songs, including the still-sung ‘Marching Through Georgia’ (1865). Born in Middletown, Connecticut, in the 1860s he became an editor and composer for the periodical, Song Messenger of the Northwest. After the war his writing declined, but in the mid-1870s he wrote ‘Grand-father's Clock’, which sold 800,000 copies. In his last years he wrote still more songs that gained him fame and respect.