FAMOUS SONG

Wairarapa Times-Age, 31 December 1940, Page 7

FAMOUS SONG

HOW IT STARTED. No song of the World War was more popular than “There’s a Long. Long Trail;” no other has remained so poignantly associated with the marching groups of 1917. Yet few realise that the music was composed a year before war broke out, and that the composer, Alonzo Elliott, a Yale senior, had Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in mind when he first picked out the tune on his piano. It made a hit when he sang it at a fraternity banquet; but American music publishers weren’t interested. In 1914, Elliott went to Cambridge University, and while shopping for a piano for his room he tested each instrument with “The Long, Long Trail. The tune so entranced the dealer that he advised a music publisher to buy lhe song. - . From the day when homesick Canadian' soldiers rolled out the tune' from a ship coming down the Thames, its popularity was assured. It sold 4,000,000 copies; and Elliott .spent the 40,000 dollars it brought learning to write operas. After 19 years he has finished his first. "What Price Glory”—just as another generation of soldiers starts marching down “the long, long trail.