THE TRUTH ABOUT SILLY WAR SONGS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 221, 17 September 1943, Page 8

THE TRUTH ABOUT SILLY WAR SONGS

EN minutes was all the time it took for one of America’s biggest industries to start converting its production lines to war work---Tin Pan Alley, when it heard of Pearl Harbour, was very soon churning out war songs with a sentiment that Americans call "phoney," and Arthur Bliss, Director of Music to the BBC calls "insincere." This condensation of an article in "Collier's Magazine," by Joe Bookman (with illustrations by Sydney Hoff), tells how this rapid conversion took place, and what came of the change. On the theory that they didn’t care who made a Nation’s Lend-Lease laws as long as they could write its songs, the Broadway songwriters sprang to their pianos (writes Bookman), and retooled their muses, converting "June," "moon," "croon,"’ and "spoon" into "scrap," "slap," "Jap," and "off the map."

automobile industry to all-out war conversion by several months. Within 10 minutes of the first news from Pearl Harbour, Benny Davis, who had participated in writing "Margie" shortly after World War I., was singing of arms and the man. That Sunday afternoon, Davis was sitting in a Broadway restaurant, which is the Mermaid Tavern of the modern American minstrel, and when he heard the news, he cried, "They asked for it-and they’re gonna get it!" He then dashed off a tune bearing this title, and on Monday it was published. Before the week was out, the .90-odd publishers of popular music were racing to produce the first "Over There" of 1942. From the presses poured ditties like "Good-bye, Mama, I’m Off to Yokohama," "Slap the Jap," "Remember Pearl Harbour," "We'll Sing Hallelujah When We’re Marching Through Berlin," "Let’s Put ‘an Ax to the Axis," "You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap," "He’s My Uncle, Uncle Sam," "Thank Your Lucky Stars and Stripes," "Buckle Down, Buck Private, Buckle Down." The trouble with these songs was that they were so synthetically forced and phoney that nobody would sing them. Although war songs were plugged into Ameri¢an ears by radio and "juke box," sensible persons simply refused to repeat such childish drivel, as is contained in a number entitled "I’m Uncle Sammie’s Soldier Now," and in which the singer tells his sweetheart not to fear, because he will bring her home a Japanese as a little souvenir. The war songs of early 1942 were written in the spirit of two small boys hurling threats at each .other-We did It Before and We Can Do It Again. This became slightly silly when the enemy began winning most of the early battles in the Pacific. Arms Around the Army The next trend was the Venus-for-Victory school of song writing, in which the stereotyped sex ballad was disguised by military camouflage. There was one called "On the Shoulder of a Soldier Let Me Rest My Head To-night." Another one, called "The Old Army Game," announced that if anyone wished to be kissed, or wanted the living they had missed, they were advised to put their arms around the Army, because love was the Army’s middle name, was the ancient Army game. The issue was stated even more bluntly by a song entitled "I Wanna be an Army Hostess." The lady explained | that when a soldier held her hand, she g he PAN ALLEY beat the

was the happiest girl in the land. Proably this Army hostess found one of the hearts which, according to Irving Berlin’s song, are constantly being lost at the Stage Door Canteen. "A soldier boy without a heart," Mr. Berlin informs us, "has two strikes on him from the start." Many war songs are so infantile that they’d be harmless, if it wasn’t that, by debasing profound issues, they help to create a moronic ideology; a bad song, like bad money, may drive the good out of circulation. In the class of tunes apparently dedicated to the: feebleminded, my favourite is a masterpiece entitled "Stamp, Stamp Out the Jap With a Defence Stamp," which invites us to send up in smokio the city of Tokyo and show the Nipponese that Uncle Sam does not jokio! Nothing Sublime, Nothing Heroic Where the song writers have failed us is in the complete absence of the sublime and the heroic. The issues are life and death, freedom against slavery, but there has not been anything to stir the mind and the heart, to crystallise the issues emotionally, as in Julia Ward Howe’s "Battle Hymn of the Republic": Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord: He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored ....

The war, and the need for genuine folk music that knits us together, only highlights a problem that has. existed for many yearsour lack of honest, popular music, and Tin Pan Alley’s tendency to choke off any possible folk expression, and give us in exchange a counterfeit article. Is -any improvement possible? To answer this question, it’s necessary to look briefly at the way in which popular songs are written, selected and exploited. Before 1920, there were important music publishing houses in Bos(Cont’d next page)

* Have you been waiting for a truly rousing popular war song that everyone will singand like? Well, you won’t get it, and here’s why t

SILLY WAR SONGS

(Continued from previous page) ton, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, Milwaukee and San Franciscomaking it possible for publishers to be near the various roots of American life, and to discover ‘new song writers with fresh regional material. To-day, the "pop" music industry is concentrated almost entirely in New York. Two huge combinations dominate the industry; the group controlled by Metro Goldwyn Mayer (the Robbins, Feist, and Miller music corporations), and the Warner Brothers group (Remick, Witmark, and Harms). Paramount Pictures controls Famous Music Corporation and Paramount Music Corporation. The film companies are not so much interested in good music as they are anxious to see that their music subsidiaries plug the film songs on the air, because every time a picture song is played, the announcer must credit the movie. This is good publicity for the movie, but it’s bad for music-because most picture tunes are "situation songs," written to fit something in the plot of the picture or tailored for one of the characters, and not having any intrinsic lyrical quality. Merit Doesn’t Matter As a matter of fact, there is no relation between the merit of a tune and the number of times you hear it on the radio. Sollie Loft, president of Campbell, Loft and Porgie, one of the large independent publishers, told me: "Merit is strictly one per cent of a song’s popularity. Any good publisher, if he puts on the heat, can get action and push’ his number-one plug song up there on the sheet." Somebody once remarked of Harry Link, the professional manager of Leo Feist, Inc., one of the smartest song pluggers in the business, that he could set the alphabet to music and make it a hit song. Besides the Hollywood-controlled publishers, there are some 20 other import‘ant independents. All the publishers have a permanently-closed door against ‘ newcomers. If another Julia Ward Howe were to arise, she couldn’t get past the reception desk of any publisher (says Bookman).

The situation is without analogy in any other field of creative work. Magazine editors and book publishers, for example, look at every manuscript that comes in. If they didn’t, such discoveries of the last decade as William Saroyan, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck, John O’Hara and Jerome Weidman would still be unpublished. But the music publisher takes the attitude that being young and unknown and not understanding the jargon of Broadway is a stigma, Unsolicited musical manuscripts are invariably returned unopened to the sender. They are never, never readyes, never. Popular songs are, consequently, produced by the same clique of writers, grinding out their annual quota’ of six tunes, good or bad, and mostly indifferent. The song writers, like any other group of creative artists forced to turn out a quantity of work regardless of whether the inspiration is there, gradually tend to rely on formulas and a convenient repertoire of stock words and phrases. The Woods Are Full of Talent What is needed, then, for Tin Pan Alley’s salvation is an infusion of new blood. Music , publishers must open their doors tc the amateurs. There is many a mute, immortal Gershwin sitting around Idaho and _Maine and Oklahoma. The publisher’s standard reply is that he can’t do this, because all popular songs are so vaguely similar that amateurs are always sueing him for plagiarism; the only way he can protect himself is to return the, manuscript envelopes unopened. I believe there’s a simpler solution to this: let the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers draw up a standard release form, which every fon professional would have to sign before submitting a song; the release would absolve the publisher of legal responsibility in the event that he later published a roughly similar song. ' Tin Pan Alley has forgotten that the universe is not bounded by 49th Street on one side and 51st Street on the other. It is good to recall that Robert Burns, probably the sweetest singer of popular songs in our language, was an Ayrshire oe when his first lyrics were published.