4
There isn’t any girl in France, dear
who in any way compares with you
I crossed the sea to take my chance, dear
with our own Red, White, and Blue
If they’ll carry me back to old New England
now that the war is through,
They can keep all the Frenchies for the French laddies
but I’m coming back to you.
—from “Yankee Girl, I’m Coming Back to You”
by Jack O’Brien and Billy Timmins
Dedicated to General Clarence R. Edwards and the 26th Division
NOT EVERYTHING OLD IS VALUABLE. Sure, some people are willing to pay a lot for certain things that have absolutely no practical or aesthetic merit, like those little glass insulator caps that fall off the tops of old power lines; no matter how long I may live, I’ll never understand the allure of those. But there is an awful lot of old stuff out there that people are just dying to unload, and if you should cross their path at the right moment, they will happily unload it upon you rather than haul it to the dump.
Take 78 rpm records. They’re heavy, ungainly, fragile, and hopelessly obsolete. They also take up an awful lot of space, and generally age pretty poorly. In my early twenties, though, none of that mattered to me. I bought them in bulk, a hundred or two at a time, for what typically worked out to about a nickel apiece. I knew their resale value was even less, but I didn’t care; I had started collecting Victrolas, and needed something to play on them.
This was the early 1990s, before Antiques Roadshow and eBay conspired to obliterate the joy of finding things serendipitously. I was living in Memphis in those days, and frequenting a flea market that sprang up monthly at the city’s old fairgrounds. Scarcely a month would pass that didn’t see me lugging home a few large and very heavy boxes of 78s. I had a ritual: crank up the Victrola, get a packet of needles, and spend the day listening to my finds. I didn’t have space for all of them; a record had to be pretty special in some way for me to keep it.
One day I put an old Victor black-label disk on the platter, dropped the needle on it, and heard this:
Over in the trenches, up to their eyes in clay,
Billy and Jack and Jimmie and Joe are singing all the day.
When they see a German sticking up his snout
They give him a chance to get out of France and then they shout:
“Keep your head down, Fritzie boy,
Keep your head down, Fritzie boy.
Late last night in the pale moonlight
I saw you! I saw you!
You were fixing your barbed wire, when we opened rapid-fire.
So if you want to see your Vater in the Vaterland,
Keep your head down, Fritzie boy!”
I played it over and over throughout that day. And many times thereafter.
A few years later, at another flea market on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I came upon a copy of the sheet music to “Keep Your Head Down, Fritzie Boy.” It was, to me at that moment, an astonishing discovery. The artwork was fairly crude—a young doughboy standing in uniform and holding a bayonet, rosy-cheeked and beaming, while other doughboys duke it out with Fritzie in the trenches behind him—but the object itself was, somehow, beautiful. I couldn’t believe I had come across it. The record was extremely entertaining but also seemed a common artifact to me; this piece of sheet music struck me as exceedingly rare.
Actually, I had it backwards. World War I coincided with the apex of the American music-publishing industry, which was then known (and still is, by some) as Tin Pan Alley. Tin Pan Alley was, in fact, a real and specific place, though not an alley—actually, it was a stretch of West Twenty-eighth Street in Manhattan, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, where a great many music publishers had their offices. It is not known why so many of them converged upon the same spot (a situation that presumably would have made intellectual espionage and theft a great deal easier), nor is it known why the place was nicknamed Tin Pan Alley (some have speculated that the term is a derogatory reference to the cacophonous effect of many different pianos playing many different songs at once). But to say that this little stretch of side street in a neighborhood that doesn’t even have a name these days was once the epicenter of American music—maybe even culture—is defensible hyperbole. No one today seems to know exactly how many music-publishing houses were clustered there in 1917, but it was big business—the biggest. It made some men tremendously rich.
To really understand the importance of Tin Pan Alley, we have to reexamine our definitions of both “music” and “publishing.” Yes, publishing houses bought the rights to songs peddled by itinerant songwriters, or “pluggers”; but more often, they wrote their own songs, sometimes three or four a day. Some houses were known to hang out signs declaring songs written to order!, and they meant it. And that’s where our reexamination of the term “music” comes in, because in those days, music was much more than merely entertainment: It was news. If something big happened—a great ship sank, or a train wreck occurred, or someone new was elected president or governor, or the stock market took a dip, or someone was assassinated—people started writing songs about it immediately, and sheet music hit the stores before the headlines had cleared the newspapers. And if something really, really big happened—like, say, America entered the greatest war the planet had ever seen—well, a lot of people started writing a lot of songs, and they didn’t stop for a long time. There was a lot to tell.
I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy.
Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?
Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,
It’s time to lay the sword and gun away.
There’d be no war today, if mothers all would say,
“I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.”
“I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” written by Alfred Bryan and Al Piantadosi, was one of the biggest hits of 1915. At a time when reports of horrific bloodletting Over There occupied the front pages of American newspapers every day, an awful lot of people Over Here wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. Some were pacifists. Some were Irish, who had no desire to fight for (and alongside) the British. Some were Russian Jews, who had fled the czar’s anti-Semitic regime and had no desire to go off and fight for the man. Some were Austrian or Hungarian and remembered their old emperor, and their empire, fondly; a great many were German, or at least of German descent (at the time, more Americans could trace their ancestors to Germany than to any other country), and resented being characterized as barbarians and Huns. And a great many more just thought the whole bloody thing had absolutely nothing to do with them. “If They Want to Fight, All Right,” declared another song title from 1915, “but ‘Neutral’ Is My Middle Name.”
It wasn’t a universal sentiment; many sympathized with “Wake Up, America!” which became a hit the following year. Must we be laughed at, America / while our swords turn weak with rust? it asked. Let us pray, God, for peace, but peace with honor / But let’s get ready to answer duty’s call. Still, there was room, in 1916’s America, for honest differences of opinion.
In April 1917, though, that all changed suddenly. “Uncle Sam’s Awake” declared a 1917 response to 1916’s musical plea; “America, Here’s My Boy” announced another title from 1917, rebuking 1915’s pacifist (or at least isolationist) hit. Suddenly, if you weren’t for the war, you were against America. Like most of America’s newspapers and politicians, its songwriters fell in line, whether because they actually believed it or simply believed it was good for business. I have come across many hundreds of pieces of World War I sheet music, but I have never seen one published after 1916 that didn’t support the war. I doubt such a thing exists. And believe me, there is a bottomless well of American World War I sheet music.
In the twenty-aughts, it would be: Do this, or don’t do that, and the terrorists win. In the late nineteen-teens, the terrorist, as far as Americans were concerned, was Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albrecht von Preussen, better known as Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia, known better still as Kaiser Bill, Billy, Willie, or, simply, the Kaiser. This was the man, after all, who had started the war so he could conquer and own the world, who had personally ordered the sinking of the Lusitania, the rape and destruction of Belgium, and all kinds of atrocities in la belle France. Or so it was said, anyway. Americans just hated the man; a popular poster of the day portrayed him as a rabid gorilla wading onto an American shore wearing a spiked helmet (the Germans called it a Pickelhaube) labeled “militarism” while clutching a defiled maiden in one hand and a club labeled Kultur (the German word for “civilization”) in the other, the charred ruins of Paris smoldering behind him, all under the slogan: DESTROY THIS MAD BRUTE. ENLIST.
Grotesque as this all might seem to us nearly a century later, it must be said that the Kaiser didn’t exactly do much to help his image Over Here, or, come to think of it, anywhere. He was bellicose, petulant, blustering, racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, paranoid, egomaniacal, megalomaniacal, conniving, treacherous, greedy, and possessed of powerful inferiority and persecution complexes. He rarely appeared in public in civilian clothes, favoring some or other extravagant military uniform. His left arm, damaged at birth in a complicated breech delivery, was withered and virtually useless; during public appearances he kept it either behind his back or awkwardly posed in front and rigidly clutching some object, creating the impression that he was up to something. And he wore his thick, stiff mustache turned straight up at the ends. Few people can pull that look off; he wasn’t one of them.
Still, I don’t think he quite deserved the battering he took in Tin Pan Alley, where he quickly became the man songwriters—and, by extension, the American people—loved to hate. Violently. Savagely. So much so that in some of their hands, the war to Make the World Safe for Democracy became the war to capture the Kaiser, do all kinds of unspeakable but horribly painful things to him, and then kill him. Several times, if possible.
You said you’d plaster Paris with your Hindenburg machine / but now it looks as if you’re on the road to Paris Green, declares one song, “The Worst Is Yet to Come” by Sam M. Lewis, Joe Young, and Bert Grant. Not particularly menacing (or, for that matter, catchy), but the sheet music is adorned with a cover illustration of the Kaiser chained to a dungeon wall, cowering on a cot under a tattered blanket, while a strapping young doughboy, perched on the mattress with one foot on the Kaiser’s chest, jabs a bayonet into the old man’s face. That alone must have sold a few copies.
In many other cases, the title was probably enough. “We’re Going to Hang the Kaiser Under the Linden Tree.” “The USA Will Lay the Kaiser Away.” “When the Yankees Yank the Kaiser off His Throne.” “We’ll Lick the Kaiser If It Takes Us Twenty Years.” “We Are Out for the Scalp of Mister Kaiser Man.” “We’re All Going Calling On the Kaiser.” (And we’ll bring him something good / A kimono made of wood.) “The Kaiser Wanted More Territory, So We Gave Him Hell.” (Soon he’ll sit on another throne / where he’s sure to be right at home / Nice red uniform, and horns upon his dome.) “I’d Like to See the Kaiser with a Lily in His Hand.” Which is to say: embalmed and laid out in that kimono made of wood.
The cover for “We’ll All Make Billy Pay the Bill He Owes” calls it “An Impressive War Song with a Punch in Every Line.” I’m not sure I agree, though I really like the cover art, which features a stern Uncle Sam holding out, at arm’s length, a document addressed to “Mr. Bill Hohenzollern” that reads: “Pay to the Order of the Allies, Suitable Indemnities to All Warring Nations and America’s Demands, France’s Demands, England’s Demands, Belgium’s Demands, Italian Demands, Serbia’s Demands, Portugal’s Demands . . .” (Portugal?) The Kaiser’s expression betrays what would, decades later, become known as sticker shock.
My favorite song of this ilk, though, is “When the Kaiser Does the Goose-Step to a Good Old American Rag” by Jack Frost (really) and Harold Neander. They’ll play it jerky / and make Bill “walk turkey” / and salute our grand old flag, the song promises. There’ll be a jazz band from Dixie / and Bill won’t dare say “Nix-ie,” / when the Yankees say, “Come, William, dance that drag.” Not only does it manage to work in all kinds of contemporary musical references—everything from John Philip Sousa to the Six Brown Brothers (a vaudeville saxophone ensemble from Canada) to Alexander’s Ragtime Band—but the song actually robs the Kaiser of something more precious to him than life: his dignity. Knowing what little I do about Wilhelm II, I suspect he might just rather have been hanged under the linden tree—particularly if, as the cover art speculates, he was forced to dance by being jabbed in the tuchus by bayonets.
Wilhelm II may have served as a lightning rod on Tin Pan Alley, but his country—and its people—were not spared, either. “Germany, You’ll Soon Be No Man’s Land.” “It’s a Long Way to Berlin but We’ll Get There.” “We Don’t Want the Bacon—What We Want Is a Piece of the Rhine!” “When We Wind Up the Watch on the Rhine.” “We’ll Sing ‘Hail! Hail! The Gang’s All Here’ on the Sidewalks of Berlin.” “We’ll Knock the Heligo—into Heligo—out of Heligoland” even tried to teach Americans a little geography. “Hunting the Hun,” by Howard E. Rogers and Archie Gottler, featured a cartoonish cover illustration of the Yanks luring hapless Germans across No Man’s Land—and into the stockade—with a barrel of “pilsner beer,” a steaming plate of sauerkraut, and an even more aromatic Teutonic delicacy:
You can capture them with ease
All you need is just a little limburger cheese.
Give ’em one little smell, they come out with a yell.
Then your work is done.
When they start to advance, shoot ’em in the pants.
That’s the game called Hunting the Hun.
It’s tempting, if you’ve ever smelled Limburger cheese, to joke that you’d be shooting the Huns in the back, since the smell would make anyone flee; but by 1918, the war had taken its toll, and most Germans didn’t have nearly enough to eat.
For pure, brazen bravado, though, you can’t beat a 1918 composition by J. Keirn Brennan and Ernest R. Ball. The lyrics aren’t what you’d call clever:
Say, Fritz, we knew we’d give you fits.
With a million Yankee hits, we blew you into bits.
Hey, Fritz, when you met Yankee wits,
We pounded you until you knew you had to call it quits.
The cover art features—who else?—Uncle Sam, pointing right at you, though instead of James Montgomery Flagg’s famously stern “I Want You” Uncle Sam, this one seems to be stifling a chuckle behind his cocky grin. But what really makes this song special is its title: “You Can’t Beat Us, For We’ve Never Lost a War.”
Clearly, Uncle Sam is a Yankee, in every sense of the word.
For every anti-German song, you’ll find another, equally passionate, pro-French song. Where the former were zippy, and often witty, the latter tended to be maudlin dirges. You wouldn’t dance to them.
Lafayette, we hear you calling, Layfayette, ’tis not in vain
That the tears of France are falling, we will help her to smile again.
For a friend in need is a friend in deed, do not think we shall ever forget.
Lafayette, we hear you calling, we are coming, Lafayette.
Like Mary Earl did in “Lafayette (We Hear You Calling),” many pluggers followed the lead of General Pershing, who, shortly after arriving in France in June, 1917, made a special pilgrimage to the grave of George Washington’s old aide-de-camp. (It was actually Pershing’s aide-de-camp, Colonel Charles E. Stanton, who uttered the famous line that has since been attributed to his boss: “Lafayette, we are here.”) Never mind the fact that America owed a similar debt to Germany, whence hailed the likes of General von Steuben and Baron de Kalb, men who arguably played an even greater role in America’s military victory over Britain than had the Marquis de Lafayette. Suddenly, Americans collectively remembered that Lafayette was their man, that they owed him, and that the time had come to repay that debt by sailing over and saving his descendants’ collective derrières. And even, perhaps, a bit more, as Jack Coogan promises in “France, We’ll Rebuild Your Towns for You”:
First we’ll send our sons and our mighty guns,
Then vic’try will come from above.
We will re-plant each field, so it will yield
The fruits of our brotherly love.
All your shattered dreams we’ll mend
In America you’ll find a friend
And we’ll send our gold across the ocean blue.
France, we’ll rebuild your towns for you.
Lafayette wasn’t the only dead French soldier summoned back to duty on Tin Pan Alley, either:
Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc, do your eyes from the skies see the foe?
Don’t you see the drooping Fleur-de-lis? Can’t you hear the tears of Normandy?
Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc, let your spirit guide us through.
Come lead your France to victory; Joan of Arc, they are calling you.
—“Joan of Arc, They Are Calling You” by Alfred Bryan, Willie Weston, and Jack Wells
While many of the songs that deal with France wallow in that country’s tremendous pool of suffering, others manage to find the bright side. France, after all, is full of French girls. It didn’t matter that they couldn’t speak English—in fact, as songs like “And He’d Say Ooh-La-La! Wee-Wee!,” and “Wee, Wee, Marie (Will You Do Zis for Me)” make plain, the linguistic differences might even have been a plus. And it wasn’t just doughboys who succumbed to the charms of their hosts:
Rosie Green was a village queen who enlisted as a nurse.
She waited for a chance, and left for France with an ambulance.
Rosie Green met a chap named Jean, a soldier from Paree.
When he said “Par-le-vous, my pet,”
She said, “I will, but not just yet.”
—“Oh! Frenchy” by Sam Ehrlich and Con Conrad
If you must go off to war, France, it seems, is as good a place as any—for gander and goose.
Looking back on it, it appears that everyone was just playing catch-up. The best song of the whole singin’ war was written right at the start.
Maybe it had to be that way. The most popular song of the war in England was written two years before the first shot was fired. “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary” isn’t even about war; it’s about an unsophisticated Irishman who goes off to London but, despite the excitement of the place, can’t stop thinking about home, and about the girl he left behind. Like many songs of the day, its writers, Jack Judge and Harry Williams, built “Tipperary” upon a pejorative ethnic stereotype—in this case, that the Irish are, shall we say, a simple people:
Paddy wrote a letter to his Irish Molly O’,
Saying “Should you not receive it, write and let me know!
If I make mistakes in ‘spelling,’ Molly, dear,” said he,
“Remember, it’s the pen that’s bad, don’t lay the blame on me.”
Strangely, it was an Irish regiment, the Connaught Rangers, that first adopted it as a marching song; London Daily Mail war correspondent George Curnock reported seeing them do so in northern France in August, 1914, just a couple of weeks after the war began. By the end of the war, just about every soldier in Europe knew it.
Lots of other English war songs made it Over Here—the most famous, perhaps, being “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag and Smile, Smile, Smile,” by George Asaf and Felix Powell, a song that really makes you want to do what it tells you to—but when the United States finally got into the war, everyone in America knew that only American war songs would do from then on. And sure enough, America was soon drawing from that bottomless well of music on West Twenty-eighth Street, singing the output of pretty much every working songwriter in the country, famous or obscure. As many songs as they wrote, though—and as good as some of them were—they were all, as I said, trying to catch up. And none of them ever would.
The first big American song of the Great War—and the best—was written by a man too old to fight, a man who, many believed, had already seen his best days go by. The grandson of Irish immigrants, George Michael Cohan was born into show business in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 3, 1878. (Cohan would claim all his life that—like his creation, the Yankee Doodle Boy—he was actually born on the Fourth of July.) Almost immediately, his parents, vaudevillians, incorporated their new baby into the act; his older sister Josie was already in it. By the time he was a teenager, he was running the show, ending each performance with his trademark farewell: “My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you.” He published his first song at fifteen, and wrote, directed, and starred in his first Broadway show at twenty-three. In the first decade of the twentieth century, he wrote a string of classic American songs that helped define the era: In addition to “Yankee Doodle Boy,” there were “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “Mary Is a Grand Old Name,” and “Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway,” to name just a few. One of the greatest Tin Pan Alley men of all time, George M. Cohan would publish more than three hundred songs.
But by 1917, it seemed to many that Cohan had passed his peak. Worse, his beloved sister Josie had died of heart disease at the age of forty the previous summer; on her deathbed in Manhattan, she had called for her brother, who raced in from Long Island but arrived a few minutes too late. His father, Jeremiah “Jere” Cohan, would die shortly after that.
And then, in early April, America entered the war. That same month, Cohan would later recount, he was riding the train into Manhattan from his home in suburban New Rochelle when the words and music just came to him:
Johnnie get your gun, get your gun, get your gun,
Take it on the run, on the run, on the run;
Hear them calling you and me;
Ev’ry son of liberty.
Hurry right away, don’t delay, go today,
Make your daddy glad to have had such a lad,
Tell your sweetheart not to pine,
To be proud her boy’s in line.
Over there, Over there,
Send the word, send the word, over there,
That the Yanks are coming,
The Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming ev’rywhere.
So prepare, Say a pray’r,
Send the word, send the word, to beware.
We’ll be over, We’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over over there!
To say that it was the greatest American song of World War I is to say not nearly enough. It’s clearly the best American war song ever written. Not that the competition is all that stiff. “Yankee Doodle”? “Battle Hymn of the Republic”? “Dixie”? “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”? “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else but Me)”? Really? The best of the rest is probably “Bonnie Blue Flag,” and frankly, I’ve never really understood that song. Who had a blue flag with one star, again?
“Over There” is simple. It’s outrageously catchy. You can sing along with it the very first time you hear it. Like “Pack Up Your Troubles,” it tells you exactly what to do and how to do it; unlike “Troubles,” it’s something you can actually do. You can get a gun; you can hurry, make your daddy proud, tell your girl to buck up. You can’t really stuff a bunch of problems into a kit bag, and even if you could, would you want to? Won’t you find enough troubles waiting for you at the front? What’s more, “Over There” gives you a great beat—a zesty, motivating beat—to which to do it all. Its lyrics are so clever that, for decades to come, everyone from Irving Berlin (Annie Get Your Gun) to antiwar novelist Dalton Trumbo (Johnny Got His Gun) would rip them off. And its title became nothing less than a synonym for the war itself.
If the rest never did catch up, at least they tried. And tried, and tried, and tried. And often, they did quite well. C. Francis Reisner, Benny Davis, and Billy Baskette had a big hit with “Good-bye Broadway, Hello France!”:
Good-bye Broadway, Hello France,
We’re ten million strong.
Good-bye sweethearts, wives and mothers,
It won’t take us long.
Don’t you worry while we’re there,
It’s for you we’re fighting too,
So good-bye Broadway, hello France,
We’re going to square our debt to you.
I don’t know where they got the figure ten million, except that maybe they reckoned it would roll off a singer’s tongue more smoothly than four million, which was the actual number of men in the ranks of the military by war’s end. (Only two million of them made it to France by the armistice; the rest were still stateside.) And I’m not sure why they chose Broadway, which gives one the impression that a bunch of theater types are heading off to the trenches. Perhaps it’s less of a mouthful than “Main Street” or “Park Place”?
They were right on the money with the sweetheart thing, though, at least judging by how many other songwriters hoped to cash in on the heartbreak of a young man leaving his best girl behind while he runs off to take a shot at the Kaiser, cranking out the likes of “I May Be Gone for a Long, Long Time,” “Send Me Away with a Smile,” “Farewell, Little Girl of Mine,” “Watch, Hope and Wait, Little Girl,” and “Uncle Sammy Take Care of My Girl,” among many others. I hope the fellow from “I’m Hitting the Trail to Normandy So Kiss Me Good-Bye” got what he wanted, even though he was way off on his destination. (American troops didn’t fight in Normandy, at least not in that war.) In “I’m Goin’ to Fight My Way Back to Carolina,” the doughboy in question is talking about both his home state and his girl.
The girls answered back with songs like “Goodbye, My Hero” and “While You’re Over There in No Man’s Land, I’m Over Here in Lonesome Land.” Presumably wiser heads are counseling them in “Set Aside Your Tears Till the Boys Come Marching Home” and “He’s Well Worth Waiting For,” which, apparently, some of the girls didn’t take to heart, because someone had to go and write “Don’t Try to Steal the Sweetheart of a Soldier.” As we learn in “Don’t Cry, Frenchy, Don’t Cry,” the boys were finding plenty of comfort Over There. If you thought the boys were the only ones given to bragging, “If He Can Fight Like He Can Love, Good Night Germany!” (If he’s half as good in a trench / as he was in the park on a bench) and “Look What My Boy Got in France” will quickly disabuse you of that fallacy. (The latter, by the way, refers to a medal, not a social disease.) And, of course, the long-awaited happy ending: “Oh! What a Time for the Girlies (When the Boys Come Marching Home),” and “When I Come Back to You (We’ll Have a Yankee-Doodle Wedding).”
Not all the girlies were satisfied to wait until the boys came marching home; the heroine of “I’m Going to Follow the Boys,” for instance (I’ve always had a lot of boys around me / Wherever boys were that’s the place you found me) decides to go Over There and become a nurse, thinking, I suppose, that she’d have the entire AEF to herself. Unfortunately for her, there was plenty of evidence that the boys had already fallen in love with other nurses, like “The Rose of No Man’s Land” and “My Red Cross Girlie (The Wound Is Somewhere in My Heart.)”
Al Jolson had a big hit with “Hello, Central, Give Me No Man’s Land,” about a night when Baby toddles up to the telephone and tries to get ahold of daddy Over There—such a big hit, in fact, that soon a competitor came out with “Hello! Gen’ral Pershing (How’s My Daddy To-Night?),” in which Baby longs for daddy o’er the sea, so To the telephone, she toddles all alone. I’m sure “Let Us Say a Prayer for Daddy” also spawned many imitations, although I’ve only ever seen one song like “Just a Baby’s Letter (Found in No Man’s Land).” Good thing, that; a person only has so many tears.
Of all the doughboy’s loves, though, one occupied a perch high above all the others: dear old mom. One of the most popular songs of the time, “Break the News to Mother,” tells of a lad who, dying on the field of battle, manages to gasp:
Just break the news to mother,
She knows how dear I love her,
And tell her not to wait for me,
For I’m not coming home;
Just say there is no other
Can take the place of mother;
Then kiss her dear, sweet lips for me,
And break the news to her.
The song was actually a hit during the Spanish-American War; the fact that it was revived, with great popularity, twenty years later tells you something about what kind of country America was thenquite simply, a nation of fervent, unashamed mama’s boys. So the fellows in Tin Pan Alley, who had mothers, too, wrote “When a Boy Says Goodbye to His Mother (And She Gives Him to Uncle Sam),” and “So Long, Mother,” and “Hello! My Darling Mother,” and “Don’t Forget Your Dear Old Mother,” and “Dreaming Sweet Dreams of Mother.” Sometimes, the boys found surrogates Over There, as does the subject of “Little French Mother, Good Bye!” And sometimes, as in “He Sleeps Beneath the Soil of France” and “On a Battlefield in France (When I’m Gone Just Write to Mother),” their little French mothers couldn’t protect them. But their real, American mothers always could, whether Over There or beyond. “I’ll Be There, Laddie Boy, I’ll Be There” ends:
When your comrades around are falling
Then your mother will answer your pray’r.
And if fighting you fall
And the Master should call,
I’ll be there, laddie boy, I’ll be there.
On the other hand, the only World War I song I’ve ever seen that mentions dear old dad up front is “Cheer Up Father, Cheer Up Mother,” and even there he has to share top billing.
Father’s Day wouldn’t become a national holiday until 1972.
As frequently as Mother turned up on the covers of sheet music in 1917 and 1918, she never even approached the Kaiser’s numbers. Only one person ever came close to the old Hohenzollern in that regard, and, with few exceptions—my favorite being “Just Like Washington Crossed the Delaware, General Pershing Will Cross the Rhine”—his name rarely made it into song titles; perhaps pluggers were intimidated by General John Joseph Pershing’s martial visage. Nevertheless, they put that visage on an awful lot of their sheet music. Whatever else you might have to say about the man, there is no disputing the fact that his face sold a lot of songs.
Historians ardently dispute pretty much everything else about him. Some revere him as the greatest supreme military commander the country ever produced, one of the finest military minds of modern times, an icon of dispassionate integrity, a pillar of determination who saved countless doughboys’ lives by refusing in the face of tremendous pressure to allow the British and French to use them for cannon fodder, and nothing less than the savior of Europe. Others denigrate him as a martinet, so behind the times that he championed marksmanship in an age of artillery, a man so stubborn that his refusal to allow American troops to serve under British and French commanders drove America’s allies insane with frustration and rage and (according to them) nearly cost them the war, so single-minded that, in the final days of the war, he sent a note to the Supreme War Council insisting that no armistice be signed with Germany short of unconditional surrender, and so inept that President Wilson was about to fire him, when the war ended and saved his command. Still others, a great many of them, stake out some territory in between the two. Entire books—lots of them—have been written on the subject, by people much more knowledgeable on the matter than I am, and still there is no universally embraced version of The Truth. I’m not going to posit one here, though I will tell you that General Pershing was tremendously popular back home, so much so that upon his return in 1919, he was promoted to General of the Armies of the United States, a rank so high it was created just for him. The only person to have achieved it since is George Washington, who was awarded it posthumously in 1976.
One of the reasons Pershing was so popular, I suspect, is that, like Robert E. Lee, it was (and is) hard to think of him as a real person. He had tremendous poise and self-control, at least in public, and he looked the part, too: firm jaw, razor-straight mustache, barrel chest, stern countenance. Filled out his uniform quite nicely. Not given to bluster or bravado. Classic strong, silent type. Possessed of an aura of quiet competence and determination, like U. S. Grant. Unlike Grant, smart enough not to let anyone draft him for president. And they tried.
He wasn’t President Wilson’s first choice for the job; that would have been General Fred Funston. Funston, though, committed the fatal error of suddenly dropping dead a few weeks before America entered the war. So Pershing it was. Until then, his highest-profile post had been along the United States’ southern border, where he’d led the 8th Regiment in search of Pancho Villa. Unsuccessfully.
Pershing had been born in Linn County, Missouri, in 1860, less than a year before that state was transformed into a bitter battleground sandwiched between Union and Confederacy. It is believed the family’s sympathies lay with the former. At the age of twenty, after two years of college, he applied to West Point because he thought it a better education than he could receive in Missouri; and it was free. He graduated in the middle of his class and was sent out West with the cavalry as a second lieutenant. After five years there (during which he may or may not have participated in the notorious massacre of Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota), he became an instructor of military tactics at the University of Nebraska, where he also earned a law degree. Returning to active duty, he was sent to Montana, promoted to first lieutenant, and put in charge of the 10th Cavalry Regiment. Buffalo Soldiers: black soldiers. Two years later, he was appointed an instructor of tactics at West Point. He was strict; the cadets didn’t much care for him. They mocked his previous posting, dubbed him “Nigger Jack.” Eventually, they toned it down to “Black Jack.” He was said to be quite proud of the sobriquet.
In 1898, he was reunited with the 10th Cavalry, took his troops to Cuba, fought at San Juan Hill, earned a citation for bravery. Then on to the Philippines, where he fought guerrilla insurgents. Other postings followed. In 1905, at the age of forty-five, he married the daughter of a powerful Republican senator from Wyoming. That same year, after a stint as an observer in the Russo-Japanese War, he was made a brigadier general by President Theodore Roosevelt, a promotion that skipped several ranks and stoked some resentment among his colleagues.
In 1914, Pershing was assigned to Fort Bliss, on the Texas-Mexico border, where he served under General Funston; he left his family ensconced at the Presidio of San Francisco. A year later he sent for them to come join him, but before they could make the move, a fire swept through their living quarters, killing Pershing’s wife and three of their four small children. It was the great trauma of his life. Among the letters of condolence he received was one from Pancho Villa. After the funerals, Pershing returned to Fort Bliss with his surviving child. He was fifty-five years old.
Then came the war.
The public certainly knew about Pershing’s family trauma; whether or not that made him a more sympathetic figure in their eyes is hard to say. Pershing’s clashes with French and British generals, his disdain for trench warfare, his refusal to allow his troops to serve under foreign commanders—to the extent to which these facets of his leadership became known to the public back home, they only made him more popular. After all, they certainly spared a great many American lives. Did people love him because he was the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, or because he was Pershing? Again, it’s hard to say. If pressed, I’d say it was both.
One thing is certain: If you were a music publisher, you would do just about anything to figure out a way to get his picture on the cover of your sheet music. No small number did.
While pluggers tried all kinds of gimmicks to get you to buy their songs, they could also be rather direct, especially when their intent was to get you—through patriotism, or shame, or some combination of the two—to pay up, as was the case in an awful lot of songs, like “Let’s Keep the Glow in Old Glory, and the Free in Freedom, Too,” and “Keep the Trench Fires Going for the Boys Out There.” Will E. Dulmage and J. Fred Lawton’s “Say—You Haven’t Sacrificed At All!” demanded:
Have you had a gun upon your good right shoulder?
Have you ever slept out in the mud?
Have you performed your duties among the rats and cooties
Have you ever shed a drop of blood for Uncle Sammy?
A tad artless, to be sure, but almost subtle compared to Gus Kahn and Egbert Van Alstyne’s “What Are You Going to Do to Help the Boys?”:
What are you going to do for Uncle Sammy?
What are you going to do to help the boys?
If you need to stay at home while they’re fighting o’er the foam,
The least that you can do is buy a Liberty bond or two.
If you want to be a sympathetic miser,
The kind that only lends a lot of noise,
You’re no better than the one who loves the Kaiser—
So, what are you going to do to help the boys?
The cover art for that sheet music actually says, in big red letters: “Buy a Liberty Bond!” Not in lieu of this song, of course. But still.
To its credit, though, for every musical guilt-trip it laid on the public, Tin Pan Alley produced dozens of wonderful pieces of light verse that people sang with pleasure for decades to come, like Charles McCarron and Carey Morgan’s “The Russians Were Rushin’, the Yanks Started Yankin’”:
The Russians were rushin’ the Prussians,
The Prussians were crushin’ the Russians.
The Balkans were balkin’ and Turkey was squawkin’,
Rasputin disputin’ and Italy scootin’.
The Boches all bulled Bolshevikis,
The British were skittish at sea.
But the good Lord I’m thankin’, the Yanks started yankin’,
And yanked Kaiser Bill up a tree.
And then there was the extremely popular song that posed, in its title, a question to the entire nation—a question that was both so catchy and so pertinent that long after the war ended, it lingered in the national consciousness: “How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree?” They’ll never want to see a rake or plow / And who the deuce can parley-vous a cow? asked lyricists Joe Young and Sam M. Lewis.
The answers, as America would soon learn: Nobody. And ya ain’t.
With so many songs—so many clever songs, catchy songs, funny or heartbreaking or offensive or ageless songs—it’s strange to think that one of my favorite World War I songs is really none of those things. I heard it on wax long before I ever found a copy of the sheet music; it’s a beautiful-looking disk, with a big Victor label in deep bold blue, and perfect, shimmering grooves, as if it had never been played before I stumbled upon it. It was recorded in 1918 by a Brooklyn-born baritone named Reinald Werrenrath. Like so many recording artists of that era, Werrenrath is now completely forgotten, but he had a good career once upon a time in music halls and studios. Like most of his colleagues, he turned his attention to patriotic fare during the war years; I own another Victor blue-label of him singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on one side and “My Country ’Tis of Thee” on the other.
The first few times I listened to “The Americans Come!” (subtitled “An Episode in France in Year 1918”), I had no idea just what it was supposed to be. It’s an unusual song, sort of an aria in the form of a father and son talking to each other, with Werrenrath singing both parts (and not altering his voice a bit as he switches back and forth). Thanks to the phenomenon of copyright expiration, I offer it to you here in full:
[Blind Frenchman speaks to son:]
What is the cheering, my little one?
Oh! That my blinded eyes could see!
Hasten, my boy, to the window run,
And see what the noise in the street may be.
I hear the drums and the marching feet;
Look and see what it’s all about!
Who can it be that our people greet
With cheer and laughter and joyous shout?
[Son:]
There are men, my father, brown and strong,
And they carry a banner of wondrous hue,
With a mighty tread they swing along
Now I see white stars on a field of blue!
[Father:]
You say that you see white stars on blue?
Look, are there stripes of red and white?
It must be, yes it must be true!
Oh, dear God, if I had my sight!
Hasten, son, fling the window wide;
Let me kiss the staff our flag swings from
And salute the Stars and Stripes with pride,
For, God be praised, The Americans come!
The song’s composer and lyricist was a musician of some repute named Fay Foster. Her entry in the Biographical Cyclopedia of American Women, published in 1924, calls “The Americans Come!” “her greatest contribution,” “the great rallying song of the last Liberty Loan Drive,” a “stirring song, highly eulogized by Theodore Roosevelt and General Pershing. . . . When [famed Irish tenor] John McCormack entertained the heroes of the Château-Thierry, this song was the favorite, and he rendered it with the greatest feeling.”
I don’t know if any of that is true; to be sure, the song itself has an element of the fantastic. In France in the year 1918, fresh, unscathed, well-fed American troops were less likely to be greeted with cheer and laughter and joyous shout than with mute stares and hands too weak to clap. Many in the crowd—if there even was a crowd—must have been thinking about their own beautiful boys, brown and strong, who marched away four years earlier and were never seen again. “God be praised”? Maybe. “Where have you been?” Definitely. The soldiers at Château-Thierry would have known as much, too.
But really, none of that mattered. Whether they actually liked it or not, “The Americans Come!” wasn’t written for the men, brown and strong, at Château-Thierry. In fact, it was written for pretty much everyone but them.
In those days, songwriters were often journalists as well as entertainers. And like so many newspapermen back then, the men and women of Tin Pan Alley, in reporting the news—or at least the news as they wished to report it—actually shaped it. And that was just to start. What they really did, in the end, was create their own reality. Fifteen years before Hollywood would successfully begin doing the same thing, songwriters told Americans who Americans were, what they were like as a people, and what kind of country they lived in—all in the context of this war they’d been swept into. And they did it so well that almost everyone else—mothers, wives, and sweethearts; John J. Pershing and Theodore Roosevelt; even the boys Over There—played along, no matter what they really believed as they lay in bed at night, hoping for sleep. They embraced the fantasy, forced themselves to ignore those prickling suspicions that it wasn’t real, and to believe that every doughboy had someone—a mother, wife, sweetheart, child, or all of the above—who was sad to see him go, who pined for him, prayed for him, sent him a letter every day, awaited his safe return; that those men who couldn’t fight gave all they had to give, and then found a way to give even more; that mothers were all proud to send their sons off to war, that wives were all bereft but making do, that sweethearts all stayed true, that children all remembered daddy every day; that German Kultur was no match for American grit, that the Hun was but a grim clown easily licked by simple country boys and savvy street urchins, that doughboys were going to march right into Berlin, grab the Kaiser by the ear, and make the man pay in all kinds of devilish ways; and that it would all be over soon, that the boys would be right back and none the worse for wear, that we’d all have a splendid time and even go to a Yankee-Doodle Wedding or two, that everything would be just as it had been.
So despite its many and sometimes grievous sins—I’ll get to those a bit later—I have to give Tin Pan Alley its due. As much as bullets and shells, rifles and bayonets, barbed wire and big guns, aeroplanes and mustard gas, trenches and U-boats—as much as anything, really, except the men and women who fought it—songs were World War I. Don’t get me wrong: I am certain that songwriters and publishers always had at least one eye on the dollars. But I think they also recognized that the news was handing them a rare opportunity to do well by doing good, and they didn’t want to miss it. I have to believe that’s why more songs were written about the First World War than about any other event in history.
Except Christmas.
Maybe.