War and Music

And now for something completely different...

Every war has had its music. Soldiers have taken their popular tunes to war with them as long as there have been popular tunes. The American Southerners who first fired on Fort Sumter in April, 1861 and later forgot that inconvenient fact by labeling our Civil War "the War of Northern Aggression" carried with them minstrel show tunes like Dixie and The Yellow Rose of Texas. The Northerners who fought to put down the rebellion brought with them songs like Lubly Fan (which we know better as Buffalo Gals) and The Year of Jubilo. Indeed, America's national anthem derives from a popular song of 200 years ago. Its tune is that of the English drinking song To Anacreon in Heaven. Francis Scott Key substituted "the land of the free and the home of the brave" for "the myrtle of Venus with Bacchus' vine" and thereby opened every baseball game in history.

Certainly there was martial music. One can't set out to massacre one's fellow men without a good marching song, now can one? But there's yet another sort of music, more in the popular vein, that fairly bleeds of wartime. It is the sentimental song of love and home. Though I may sound casually sarcastic as is my wont, these songs are often achingly beautiful and unquestionably moving when thought of in context.

What brings this to my mind is that as I write I am listening to a mix of news headlined by the senseless deaths in Iraq of more young Americans, sacrificed on the alter of neo-con ideology and Dubya's ego. In between news reports is a jazz program that has drawn heavily on the music of World War II. It strikes me that it is impossible to listen to a song like Sentimental Journey or Moonlight in Vermont without seeing the young men, two of whom were my father and Uncle Eddie, on the fields of Northern Europe or the islands of the Pacific. Nor is it possible to hear them without seeing the families and lovers waiting for their soldiers and sailors to make that sentimental journey home.

Perhaps the most sweetly sad of all Christmas songs is Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas written in 1943-4. Not even White Christmas captures the yearning in every syllable of Hugh Martin's lyric:

Someday soon we all will be together

If the fates allow.

Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow.

So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Martin's original lyrics were far more bitter and cynical, so much so that Judy Garland refused to sing them in Meet Me in St. Louis. The compromise above is still ineffably sad.

Those songs carry on a tradition from Civil War songs like Just Before the Battle, Mother and Aura Lea and include a hit on both sides of the European "Theatre" lines in both World Wars, Lili Marlene.

Vor der Kaserne, Vor dem großen Tor
Stand eine Laterne, Und steht sie noch davor
So woll'n wir uns da wieder seh'n
Bei der Laterne wollen wir steh'n
Wie einst Lili Marleen.
Wie einst Lili Marleen.

Underneath the lantern by the barrack gate
Darling I remember the way you used to wait
'Twas there that you whispered tenderly
That you loved me, You'd always be
My Lili of the lamplight
My own Lili Marlene.

The English lyrics are more like a love song that retains something of both the meaning and spirit while, in German, there is the sadness of hoping in vain caught in that refrain that more exactly translates "As once, Lili Marlene."

Romantic songs continued to appear during the war in Korea but since then we have had unreal, even surreal wars that inspired protests more than songs of longing and derived their music from the hard, urban beats of rock and roll during Vietnam and Hip-Hop and Techno during our 2 more recent oil wars.

Was there an analog for I'll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time from Vietnam or either Gulf War? I don't think so. I could be missing something though I doubt it.

Certainly there are lovers parted from the men and women now serving in Iraq. Certainly they pine for their lover to come home. Certainly they are in a constant state of fear and worry that the one they love may be in the way of the next explosion on the next roadside. Yet the popular songs expressing their longing and anxiety seem absent. And I wonder why.

I want to offer one possibility. Perhaps those songs are absent because neither in Vietnam nor either Gulf War are we convinced that we actually are at war. Perhaps we view the absence of loved ones as an excessively long vacation in a dangerous land.

I think that for 40 years and more we have expected that those loved ones will come home physically whole rather than dead or maimed. We have had wars in which we have been insulated from the consequences and that insulation obviates the need for the songs of longing for home or for someone's homecoming.

If we do not accept that wars have consequences for us I think that makes it easier for a group of power-mad ideologues to fantasize that they can march into a country as occupiers amid showers of flowers and the cheers of the conquered people. I don't know if I'm correct in this but, should I be, we are in a frightening time indeed. If we have disjointed war from its inevitable consequences we are more likely to go to war more often with dire results for all concerned.

I think we will be better off when we start hearing a contemporary equivalent of I'll Be Seeing You.