Cavalry vs. Calvary: Not a hill to die on

Etched in stone: Note the spelling correction on the seventh line of this marker

 Forty years ago, a British country singer named Paul Kennerly wrote a concept album dealing with the Civil War from a Southern perspective. "White Mansions" is far from politically correct, but it has become a cult classic. The characters were portrayed by  Waylon Jennings, his wife Jessi Colter, and John Dillon and Steve Cash from the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.
 One of my favorite songs on the album was about two warhorses, "The Union Mare and the Confederate Grey" (click to listen). Kennerly betrays his roots by using "grey" instead of "gray," which is how we usually spell it down South.
 But the greater faux pas in the song is in the way Waylon Jennings sang it. In an otherwise outstanding performance, he pronounced cavalry as calvary:

Two horses were trotting. They pranced and they ran.
Each one was commanded by a calvary man.
Two horses stood grazing where their dead riders lay.
A Union mare and a Confederate grey.

They nuzzled each other, as they teased and had fun.
They bathed in the warm rays of the old Southern sun.
No more senseless orders for them to obey.
So they acted like lovers, this mare and this grey.

Now these are such sad times that we're all living in.
For killing your brother is the mightiest sin.
How happy we'd be if we acted the way
of the Union mare and the Confederate grey.

Two horses were trotting. They pranced and they ran.
Each one was commanded by a calvary man.
Two horses stood grazing where their dead riders lay.
A Union mare and a Confederate grey.

 At least when Joan Baez recorded "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," she got "cavalry" correct when she changed "till Stoneman's cavalry came" into "till so much cavalry came."
 It's a common mistake. The Civil War memorial in Tampa, Fla., used Calvary instead of Cavalry, and it cost the veterans' committee $1,635 to fix the cast metal plaque.
 Cavalry was originally misspelled on the stone that marks the site of the May 1, 1865, skirmish in northern Anderson County, S.C. Jimmy Orr, who worked with the Sons of Confederate Veterans to install the monument in 1998, says he is unsure if the error was his or the engravers. "We Baptists are obsessed with Calvary, for obvious reasons," he said.
 Toward the end of Stoneman's Raid, during the pursuit of Jefferson Davis, it is said that some of Stoneman's cavalry camped at Calvary Episcopal Church in Fletcher, N.C. This account of Gen. Stoneman sparing the church is a myth, as the general was no longer with the raid by the time they passed through Henderson County. We don't know much about the general's faith, but we do know he had a unique perspective on the desecration of Southern churches.