Popular Song in the First World War

An International Perspective

John Mullen, John Mullen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351068666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

What did popular song mean to people across the world during the First World War? For the first time, song repertoires and musical industries from countries on both sides in the Great War as well as from neutral countries are analysed in one exciting volume. Experts from around the world, and with very different approaches, bring to life the entertainment of a century ago, to show the role it played in the lives of our ancestors. The reader will meet the penniless lyricist, the theatre chain owner, the cross-dressing singer, fado composer, stage Scotsman or rhyming soldier, whether they come from Serbia, Britain, the USA, Germany, France, Portugal or elsewhere, in this fascinating exploration of showbiz before the generalization of the gramophone. Singing was a vector for patriotic support for the war, and sometimes for anti-war activism, but it was much more than that, and expressed and constructed debates, anxieties, social identities and changes in gender roles. This work, accompanied by many links to online recordings, will allow the reader to glimpse the complex role of popular song in people's lives in a period of total war.

Part I

What voices can be heard in wartime popular song?

1 What voices can be heard in British music-hall songs of the First World War?

John Mullen

Popular music of many genres has been claimed as expressing a particular social voice. For Cecil Sharp and many others, folk music was or is the voice of the people;¹ rap or punk rock have been presented as the voice of marginalized, dominated youth.² What can we say about British wartime music hall of a century ago? What voices could be heard? The title of my chapter is deliberately ambiguous. It would normally be taken to mean ‘Whose interests and priorities are expressed in music-hall songs of the war period?’ My (tentative) answers to this question will constitute the first part of my chapter, during which I will look at elite voices, working-class voices, and gendered voices in music-hall repertoires and practices. However, in the second part, I will look at the question ‘How was voice used by music-hall singers during the Great War?’ with the help of a few examples of hit songs. Finally, I will try to sketch out some links between the two sets of conclusions.

The question of music hall as the voice of the people or of the elite has been posed by others for earlier periods, notably Victorian Britain, the debate occasionally simplified as ‘class expression versus social control’.³ Some writers have emphasized the conservative and jingoistic politics often to be heard in music hall lyrics, and have linked this to the social position of theatre owners and managers, newcomers to local elites. Others have underlined the usefulness to the urban working class of songs which put their lived experience at the centre of an evening’s entertainment, and allowed them to laugh and sing along with stars who came from their own milieu and sang in their common language about the hardships, satisfactions and dreams which made up their ordinary life. In this way, they may have validated urban working-class experience in a way that other repertoires – folk or operetta, for example – could not.

Before we examine the wartime repertoire with this debate in mind, it is worth thinking about the context in which the voices were heard: the music hall itself. Who was at home in the music hall? The furnishings – red plush and marble pillars – imitated elite tastes to the point of caricature. The appearance of luxury was essential, and this is suggested by the very names of the theatres: the Empire, the Palace, the Coliseum or the Alhambra. At the Oxford theatre in London one moved among ‘Corinthian columns and bars smothered in flowers and glittering with mirrors’.⁴ At the Palace, a ‘grand staircase columned with green marble and gilt capitals’ led up to the royal box.⁵ The Nottingham Empire boasted smiling idols representing Krishna on either side of the stage and four giant gilt elephant heads in the four corners of the auditorium.⁶

Yet the mass of the audience was working class, whether traditional or (more and more) ‘white-collar’: aspirational office clerks, minor civil servants and shop workers. These growing groups had clean hands and often felt themselves a cut above the manual workers, but were frequently poor and over-worked.⁷ The music hall was a place where, for once, the luxury was for them. And yet, unlike the also popular municipal concert halls, where classical concerts were presented at very low prices for the masses, the music hall was not obsessed with ‘elevating’. There was no need to sit in silence and worry about clapping in the wrong places. In the music hall the worker felt at home, with sing-along and neighbourly bonhomie for a ‘Sweet Saturday night’.⁸ The term ‘people’s palace’ was not used without a reason. But within this pretence of a home, what voices were dominant?

Elite voices

The most important way in which wartime music hall might be seen to be acting as an elite voice is that it was a tool building support for the war drive, for the empire’s cause. This role was particularly important in Britain, where conscription was not used during the first years of the conflict (whereas Germany and France mobilized millions of men by conscription in the first weeks of the war). In Britain, political leaders, trade union leaders, feminist leaders and church leaders almost unanimously called for men to join up and fight, and music-hall stars joined in the chorus. Certainly, writers such as Siegfried Sassoon⁹ or J. B. Priestley¹⁰ tended to dismiss the wartime music-hall repertoire as mainly jingoistic and wholly subordinate to the establishment. They based their complaints on a number of elements. First and foremost, there was the wave of songs of recruitment and enthusiasm which flooded into the music hall in 1914, with titles such as the following:

• We Don’t Want to Lose You but We Think You Ought to Go

• The Army of Today’s All Right

• My Volunteer (He’s come from his desk in the city)

• Our Brave Colonials

• Sandy Boy, My Soldier Laddy

• Men of England, You Have Got to Go!

• Be a Soldier, Be a Man!

• For the Honour of Dear Old England

• I’d Like to Be a Hero, Too!

• March on to Berlin!

• It’s a Grand Sight to See Them Going Away!

• Tommy Is as Good a Man as Any Knight of Old

And other, later songs showing a light hearted and enthusiastic view of the war:

• Cheer Up Little Soldier Man 1915

• God Give Us Victory! 1915

• Our Whistling Tommies 1915

• We’ll Never Let the Old Flag Fall 1915

• The Tanks that Broke the Ranks Out in Picardy 1916

• The Baby Tank 1916

These songs, along with the reports of rousing speeches on the stage of the music hall (sometimes in the tone ‘Two shillings for the first man to join the army here tonight!’), and the leading role of a small number of music-hall stars (such as Harry Lauder and Vesta Tilley) in the recruitment campaigns, have led to conclusions which echo the words of Lawrence Senelick, who wrote, of an earlier period:

Much of the energy the working man might have directed to ameliorating his own situation was rechannelled by the music hall to the advancement of [the British] empire.¹¹

There are, however, grave problems with this conception. If the music-hall artistes and music-hall songs which campaigned for the empire may have been particularly effective (working-class singers in the workers’ favourite place for a Saturday night out are more convincing than ‘posh’ politicians or bishops), they were by no means exceptional. Almost all religious leaders, feminist leaders, union leaders, politicians and intellectuals went at least as far.

More importantly, there has been, until recently, no attempt to judge how representative the enthusiastic war songs were in the song repertoire. The same dozen songs are always quoted, among the thousands produced at the time which lie forgotten in the archives of the British Library. When I was able to analyse a full corpus of over a thousand wartime music hall songs, the conclusions were somewhat different.¹² First, recruitment songs, and heroic songs about the war, all but disappeared after only a few months of the conflict. The recruiting campaign was at its fiercest in the second half of 1915, but the collection of Greatest Hits of 1915 published by the biggest of the sheet music companies, Francis and Day,¹³ contains no recruitment songs at all.

Second, only a third of wartime songs speak of the war or the changes in life because of the war, and enthusiastic songs make up a small minority of this third. Songs dreaming of the end of the war rapidly take over from heroic songs. Indeed, ‘home’ is the word most frequently encountered in song titles. The seven most common words in titles (in a corpus of 1,143 song titles 1914–1918) were:

• Home, 69 occurrences

• Girl, 68

• Boy, 57

• Love, 44

• Soldier, 42

• Song, 41

• Ireland, 36

Hardly a glossary of jingoism. For every 1918 song with the word ‘victory’ in the title there are ten with the word ‘home’, and the same is true for the following year.¹⁴

Finally, even at the start of the war there are no songs about hating Germans. In contrast with the French repertoire, which benefitted from an already established stock of anti-German songs (written in the period after France lost Alsace and Lorraine to the new German Empire in 1871), British songs about hating Germans are completely absent. There are a number of reasons for this: the German people were close to the British before 1914, and particularly in the music industry. The ‘German band’ was an important feature of entertainment, and the best pianos were im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and music examples
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Beyond the question of morale: Popular song in the First World War
• PART I: What voices can be heard in wartime popular song?
• PART II: Gender, commercial song and war
• PART III: The expression of national and social identities
• Index