Tv and sunday on American History tv on cspan3. He discussed how song writers contributed to the war effort by writing patriotic music. This is an hour and 15 minutes. Good evening to all of you. Im bob enholm, the executive director of the Woodrow Wilson house. Were a private charity supported by donations of supporters, including many of you. For that i thank you. Thanks for being here this evening. This home is the home to which president and mrs. Wilson moved the very day they left the white house, on march 4 in 1921. They both lived here the rest their lives. Wilson passed away three years later. Mrs. Wilson lived here until 1961. Then upon her death, left the home to the National Trust for historical preservation. It was opened as a Public Museum in 1963. We are now more than 50 years as an institution here in washington, d. C. Its good to see all of you here tonight. Our program is smile while you kiss me sad adieu, world war i songs. Let me set the stage and introduce or speaker quickly. We like to say here we like to remind people that president wilson imagined the world at peace and proposed a plan to achieve that vision. Thats a remarkable accomplishment when we think about it from the Vantage Point of our own lives 100 years later. Its perhaps even more remarkable f we transport our sfrls back to his time and think about the world in which he lived and the ideas that were abroad at that time and the remarkable accomplishment that it was for him in the middle of a world war to imagine what the world ought to look like at peace and to propose that should be our sort of default position, that there ought to be a league of nations and that people ought that nations ought not to engage in aggressive war. This house allows us to take that trip back in time. Were surrounded in this room by gifts of state that president wilson received. One of the reasons he received so many spectacular gifts is, first, because he was the First American president to go to europe while he was in office. Secondly, because the world so hoped for him to succeed in the mission he had taken on of ending the catastrophe that was world war i. Its hard to think about how shocking world war i was to the people who had to live through it. The music of that era, like this house, is something that can help transport us back to that time. I think as you will see, hearing from michael, that we will have a sense of the music that existed and the america that existed before the war and the music that reveals to us the america that came out of that war. You will see something of a transformation there. Michael is a critic and teacher about american music. Have i written down because hes written two books that i want to share with you. We have available after his lecture. Hes in the process of writing a third. He is the aurmer of americas songs two from the 1890 to the post war years. This is a companion piece to a book he wrote with a coauthor. So he has established himself as a song bird here. I heard hes not going to sing. Im sorry to disappoint you. He is working on a book called the song is us, love lyrics and American Life, 1900 to 1950. Im looking forward to the fourth volume about the urban hip hop thing that i know hes an expert on. We will look forward to hearing from him this afternoon. He is a graduate of dartmouth. He has been lecturing on music and songs in american for about 30 years. With that, let me introduce michael lasser. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you. Thank you. Im going to be treating songs as, in effect, documents. That is, when you listen to a song from your own time, somehow its a mirror on that time. It reflects the attitudes of that time. More about love than anything else. But attitudes toward love and romance and sex and marriage, obviously change over the first half of the 20th century in case you hadnt noticed, take my word for it. Songs reflect that. But for us, 100 years after the songs of world war i, those songs are not a mirror. They serve instead as a window and let us look back on what the people were thinking and feeling and how they behaved. Songs are a particularly good way to get at it, because they have no aspiration, really, beyond having you like it well enough to buy it. Irving berlin said a good song is one that sells. And he was not simply saying i need more money, because he was a multimillionaire when he said it. What he was saying was, he trusted the judgments of the people. If you go out and buy my song for whatever it costs, 15 cents in sheet music, 79 cents on an old 78 rpm record, it doesnt really matter, if you download it from the internet, you are in effect voting with your pocketbook. So a good song is one that sells. Its really a very democratic lower case d point of view. I think you can make the case that the great song writers certainly from the first half of the 20th century were democratic populists, although they didnt see themselves that way. The irony in that is that they were millionaire democratic populists. You dont encounter that very often. But they never lost their ability to pick up what was in the air. When they walked down the street, they were listening for a catch phrase, some slang. When they read the newspapers, they were looking for a story that they could turn into a song. And so when war was declared in 1914 at the time when tin pan alley had come into existence and was flowering, it was blooming you know what tin pan alley was. Youre all nodding. Tell me then. What was tin pan alley . Notice how the room just changed. What was tin pan alley . It started as a neighborhood in a particular block. Lets look at more than geography and get at the heart of what it was. Writers would gather. It became more of an idea or a concept. The song writers would gather there. Yeah, they did. Why . No, no. Its where the Music Publishers were. And most of the song writers in the early years of the 20th century the professional song writers. Im not talking about charlie with a guitar and pencil. Song writers were under contract to the publishers. And they would crank out what the market wanted, because they were told to do so. That is, contintin pan alley is home of Music Publishing in the United States between roughly you know when you get into years in history, its never very useful. They are arbitrary. Roughly 1895 to 1930, 35, give or take. During the 30s, hollywood, with the the coming of talkies and musicals, the studios bought up the major publishers and moved their main offices to california because they didnt want to pay royalties anymore. Even though tin pan alley still exists after that comes to be a again a its a generic term for music. It was located off broadway in the west 20s. It was where the songs came from by the thousands. These people did not sit around waiting for inspiration. Its a highly overrated gift. When you limit yourself to work produced by inspiration, you end up with a very, very small bibliography in your name. You make it happen. You force it. Some days you fill up wastebaskets, occasionally you have a day when you dont. But you work. The coming of the war, even though we were determined to stay out of it im not going to do a history of isolationism. Because im here to talk about songs, not giving a capsule history of world war i. The coming of the war was a boon to the song business. That is, publishers and songwriters did literally look around for markets to appeal to and then looked for a way to appeal to those markets. And with the coming of the war in europe, even though we were determined to stay out of it, there were not surprisingly a wave of patriotism in this country. And that started to produce songs, because patriotism is exactly the kind of clear emotion that something as brief as a song can do something with. Remember that most of the songs im talking about and most of the songs written during whats come to be known as the Great American song book were 32 bars long. They fit on one side of a 78 rpm record. If you are old enough to remember those, you know you could get at most three minutes and 20 seconds of music on a side. Then you flipped it over and had another three minutes and 20 seconds. As a kid, i bought them for 79 cents. I dont know what you paid. It wasnt until the late 40s that you get the lp which prom i promises you 40 minute 40 minu music. You still have to flip it. When you bought an album on 78 rpm, first of all, it came with its own wheelbarrow it was so heavy. And it was like a big book. So you put it on the record player and every three minutes had you every five minutes because they used 12inch records, had you to change it to the next recording. So you never heard it whole. But you heard it. That was the point. With the coming of the war, we started writing songs. And the first songs we wrote were about staying out of the war. You have got more songs on the list than i can ever play. I thought you would like to see some titles. On the list of lyrics, you have more songs that im going to play. There wouldnt have been time for all of them. Most of these songs are available. You can go to i tunes on amazon. You can go to the public lie ba brarry. They are out there if you want to hear songs of world war i. You can. Are there as many available as there were in world war ii . Of course not. The recording business was much more sophisticated, distribution was more effective, there were many more people making recordings in world war ii. But they were there is one song on the list i want to point out to you apropoe of nothing, because its a good story. Under 1918, you will see a song called smile and show your dimple. By Irving Berlin who sometimes i think wrote every song. The others are just rz÷ the r people are just pseudonyms for berlin. 1917. Thank you. Does anybody happen to know the song smile and show your dim e dimple . Dont sing it. I want to surprise them. He published it. It did not do well. He put it back in their trunk. They never threw anything rogers heart wrote new lyrics to the song that became blue moon four different times before it finally took. They never give up on a song. That doesnt mean they all succeed eventually, but sometimes they do. So berlin pulled the song. And then in 1932, he was trying to write an act one finale for a show called as thousands cheer, a review, a political review, during the depression. They couldnt come up with a song. And he remembered this song from world war i. And he pulled it, and he listened to it. And he said, yeah, that will do. And he wrote a new lyric for it. Would you like to sing with me . In your Easter Bonnet smile and show your dimple youll find its very simple its about a young woman who has kissed her dough boy goodbye. Shes standing on the train platform crying. Someone older sees her and tries to comfort her, smile and show your dimple. Buck up, hes coming home. And were going to go beat the kaiser, that sort of thing. Anyway, i thought you would like to know that. Apropos. Isnt that a neat story . The first song to become a hit in world war i, and by the way, it is thought to be our most musical war. More songs in response to the war than any other war in American History. Again, because tin pan alley was so explosively productive. There was a young woman who wrote a song, and there were a number of songs like this. Im not going to play this one, im just going to mention it, because the only recording i can find was so bad in quality, you wouldnt have been able to get the words. But i did include the words for you. Its called, the very first one yeah no, its the second one, we take our hats off to you mr. Wilson, written by a woman named blanche merrill who was a teenager when she wrote it. She went on to become a professional songwriter, known for writing specialty material for fannie bryce in the ziegfeld follies. The songs at the beginning of the war are clearly about not getting in. But they become much more personal than that. You know, we take our hats off to you, mr. Wilson, is a kind of generalized salute. Its the kind of thing a Group Marches down the street singing. And popular songs now had to do that. But popular songs are mainly good at the emotionalism that exists between two people. In all of the history of popular music in this country, probably 98 of the songs have two characters in them. I and you. And then its about whats going on, or not, between us. So a more typical song is when you start getting into the intense personal emotions. Now, in world war im sorry, in the civil war, young men going off to war, never having been away from home before and very young. And it was a much less sophisticated country. A lot of them farm boys. A lot of them immigrants. An awful lot of the union army spoke with an irish accent during the civil war. They did fight a good part of that war for the north. The songs of the civil war that were in effect love songs were about a boy and his mother. There were very few that were stories of romantic love. About how much i miss you, and ill come home to you. Or shes home saying, ill be faithful. Very few of those. There are some sentimental ballads like aura lee, and in the north and lorina in the south, which are songs of praise for an idealized woman. But thats as close as you come to it. In the civil war, theyre mainly about mom. And junior is writing a letter home to his mother, that sort of thing. One of the best of them is a song called just before the battle mother, which is a lovely song. During world war ii, jump, there are a few mother songs, mothers proud that youre in uniform, sonny, that sort of thing, that unfortunately had not survived. The songs are the love songs of the war are largely about a couple, whether married or not, separated. So the emotions of warfare in song are in the love songs, and youll see this a little bit later, are about separation, parting, loneliness, longing, the hope of return. You find those in the love songs of world war i, and you find them in the love songs of world war ii. And those three wars, civil, i and ii, are really the wars where there is a large body of song because there was a sense of the nation engaged, that there was not certainly in the wars since world war ii. There arent a lot of songs about korea. And im not being snotty. It was a different kind of war. The people were not engaged by it. In vietnam, you had some songs, but theyre songs in which two groups are warring with one another. Give peace a chance, and whats the im an oaky from muskogee. Iraq and afghanistan dont produce a lot of songs. Again, because in a way they were invisible, and in a way, we know about them, were not as a nation engaged in it. We dont have a citizen army anymore. That gets in the way of that. So in world war i, you have a mix. Really, in the middle between the two wars, and it shows. There were songs about mom, and there were songs about sweetie. Soldiers singing im going to pin the medal on the girl i left behind in world war i. Between world war i and world war ii, love songs that ill save for a few minutes. But its the mother song that i want to get to. Again, its the idea of staying out of it, delivering a kind of anthem in the way that the first song is an anthem, and yet also capitalizing on the kind of direct emotionalism that popular songs are good at. And its called i didnt raise my boy to be a soldier. No, its not mothers didnt raise their children. Not, lets all march in favor of mothers who oppose the war, but i didnt raise my son to be a soldier. Listen to the words, and you have them. I dont vouch for their accuracy. I took them off the internet and i confess i didnt do a meticulous check between the recording and the lyrics. But theyre close. Wrong song, sorry. Oh, i just screwed it up. Stay with me. I should not be allowed near technology. 3,000 miles from home, an American Army is fighting for you. Everything you hold worthwhile, only the hardest blows can win against the enemy we are fighting. Evoking the spirit of our forefathers, the army asks your unflinching support for the high ideals for which america stands may endure upon the earth. Thats pershing. A million soldiers to the war have gone who may never return again a million mothers hearts must break for those who have died in vain it is in sorrow in her lonely years i heard a mother murmur through her tears i didnt raise my boy to be a soldier i brought him up to be my pride and joy and to place a musket on his shoulder to shoot some other mothers darling boy its time to lay the sword and run away there would be no war today if mothers our would say i didnt raise my boy to be a soldier okay. There had been, as you know, a great wave of immigration into the country, beginning in the years after the civil war. People not from ireland, and scotland, and england, but people from different parts of europe. And there was a certain amount of resistance to them, as you know. There was a rise in nativism, what we came to call nativism, as people began to arrive. They were russians, and they were italians and they were poles and jews and greeks and romanians. And they werent like us. Over the next 50 years, they changed what us means. But it obviously was a great struggle. There had also in the years leading up to the war been an increase in immigration from germany. There were a lot more new americans who were of german extraction, had been born in germany, and came here. And so here youve got all these people from all these Different Countries who havent been here that long, and on top of it all, youve got all these people from germany, for crying out loud, were they going to fight for america. And, of course, nobody knew the answer. They neednt have worried. They came here because they wanted to come here and they joined up and they fought. But it was still an open question. And so Irving Berlin wrote a song aimed in 1916 aimed specifically at this audience. Because the tide was turning. There was a sense, increasingly, that america was siding with the allies. That we were more interested in taking the side of england than germany. Because, again, at the beginning, the main feeling was, lets not get involved with these people, lets stay out. And so there was no sense and the special relationship that we have forged, in quotes, that we have forged with the english didnt exist. This came after world war i. So it was tricky. It was tricky. And so berlin writes this song because he thinks he knows what we ought to be doing. And he sees where the country is beginning to go. And he wants to make sure that the new immigrants will be americans. Ill have to change the track. Give me one minute. Wrong track, sorry. I really should have someone doing this for me. Im going to waste a lot of my time and yours fooling around with it. But you can edit it out, right . Would you like me to take that over . Yes,