World War I - Modern Songs of War and Conflict

The Sounds of World War I

Until 1917, the United States remained neutral in World War I. Still, popular sheet music painted a romantic image of going off to fight for one’s country. For example, Chas K. Harris published Eddie Stembler and Joseph F. Dunn’s “Daddy I Want To Go” in 1915, two years before the U.S. joined the Allied Powers. This selection for voice and piano features a full-color cover of a little boy wearing a toy sword and holding the hand of his father, who wears an army uniform. Other soldiers prepare to move out in the background, while a toy drum and trumpet lie forgotten in the foreground. The lyrics of this song emphasize sound in a similar way to the cover: “A call to arms has just resulted, / For Old Glory’s Been insulted, / War is gnawing at the breast, / As the troopers march away, / A Yankee lad is heard to say / Daddy, Daddy, I want to go, / I want to fight our country’s foe, / I’m tired of playing soldiers with the boys / Whose only pleasure is to play with toys.”^[i] Despite this romanticized image of a little boy eager to answer the “call to arms” in World War I, the sonic reality of trench warfare was anything but a “pleasure.” Putting research on auditory damage in World War I in conversation with popular sheet music of the time reveals an extreme contrast between the way that the war was heard and the way it was sung.

 World War I saw the Central and Allied Powers taking advantage of a wide variety of new technologies, many of which were sound-based. Most armies began using sound ranging, which involved microphones that recorded the velocity and aim of gunfire.^[ii] This helped them determine the source of the artillery even if they could not physically see their opponents.^[iii] The technology also was increasingly loud. For example Austria-Hungary’s offensive against Italy included “a mixture of gas and high explosive shells” from 2 AM to 4:30 AM, followed by more shelling and infantry movement.^[iv] A 2018 survey of 1914–1925 sources estimates that troops engaged in trench warfare subjected their ears to “185 dB of sustained noise from new, high-energy weapons, which caused ‘labyrinthine concussion.’”^[v] For context, a trombone played directly into the ear creates 110 dB of sound, a jackhammer emanates 130 dB, and a gun being shot without a silencer produces 140 dB. Furthermore, hearing experts estimate that any sound above 70 decibels has the power to damage human ears.^[vi] As a result, it is not surprising that a 1917 field hospital survey found that 3–9% of those who were hospitalized had problems with their ears. At the time, an otolaryngologist estimated that disability pensions would be necessary for 2.4% of soldiers following the armistice.^[vii]

 These grave sonic realities took some time to appear in the sheet music popular during World War I. Juck Judge and Harry William’s “It’s a Long Long Way To Tipperary” was published in 1912, two years before World War I broke out; however, it was very popular with troops in the early days of the war. This song imagines an “Irish lad” named Paddy roaming London and singing, “It’s a long way to tipperary / To the sweetest girl I know / Farewell, Leicester Square / It’s a long, long way to Tipperary / But my heart’s right there.”^[viii] Five years later, Harry Von Tilzer and Val Trainor wrote a similarly-named song, “It’s a Long, Long Way to the U.S.A. (and the Girl I Left Behind.)”^[ix] Von Tilzer and Trainor’s song draws on some of the sonic realities of the war, situating a soldier’s fond memories of his girlfriend “while the cannon shells were screaming / ‘Mid the battle’s loudest roar.” In the chorus, the soldier asks his friend, “And if you get back some day / Give my love to her and say / That her boy was true, / Tell dear mother too, / Just to always treat her kind.” Despite this song’s sad lyrics, the chorus (and therefore the song’s conclusion) is resolutely in Bb major, with a somewhat jaunty baseline accompanying the melody. The lack of sad musical accompaniment transforms the mournful lyrics into a song appropriate for entertainment.

Popular songs from World War I only partially reflect the harsh realities of machine guns and trench warfare that cost many World War I soldiers’ lives. The Hugo Keesing Collection on World War I contains over 370 pieces of sheet music that invite further investigation of this dissonance.

Developments in the Music Industry Surrounding World War I

           1914–1919 saw a series of important changes that led to the development of the modern music industry as we know it. World War I took place before radio technology was widely available, so most people interacted with popular music by purchasing sheet music. These pieces of sheet music generally included covers with detailed illustrations, which might feature artists involved in the music’s creation or have some connection to the song’s meaning.^[i] After purchasing their sheet music, people could sing and play along on their pianos. This instrument was incredibly popular in 1914, with American factories making 323,000 pianos in that year alone.^[ii] Music-lovers less interested in performing themselves could also purchase wax or unbreakable cylinders for their gramophones or records for their phonographs.^[iii]

As the success of the Tin Pan Alley sheet music industry grew, music publishers and writers banded together to safeguard their intellectual property. A desire for greater copyright protections led a variety of composers to found the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) on February 13, 1914.^[iv] The Hugo Keesing Collection on World War I includes materials by two founding members of ASCAP: Jean Schwartz (“America Needs You Like a Mother (Would You Turn Your Mother Down?),” “Hello Central! Give Me No Man’s Land,” “Tell That To the Marines,” and “I’m on a Long Long Ramble”) and Irving Berlin (“The Ragtime Soldier Man,” “They Were All Out of Step But Jim,” “Let’s All Be Americans Now,” “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” and “Good-Bye France (You’ll Never Be Forgotten by the USA)”). Schwartz (1878–1956) moved to New York City from Hungary with his family when he was ten and specialized in music for Broadway musicals.^[v] Berlin (1888–1989) was born in Germany, but like Schwartz, his family moved to New York City when he was a child. In addition to his songs on World War I, Berlin wrote many songs for Hollywood and Broadway.^[vi]

Three years after Schwartz, Berlin, and other founders established ASCAP, on January 22, 1917, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Herbert v. Shanley Co. The Court decreed that composers are entitled to financial compensation if restaurants and hotels perform their music while charging patrons for another form of entertainment. The court’s ruling states, “It is true that the music [at a restaurant] is not the sole object, but neither is the food, which probably could be got cheaper elsewhere. The object is a repast in surroundings that to people having limited powers of conversation, or disliking the rival noise, give a luxurious pleasure not to be had from eating a silent meal. If music did not pay, it would be given up.”^[vii] Historians view this court case as providing the legal grounds for ASCAP’s licensing work, which continues to the present.

Mothers, Girlfriends, and Their Soldiers: Gender on the Covers of World War I Sheet Music

               Women campaigned for equal status as American citizens as early as 1776, when Abigail Adams famously asked her husband John to “remember the ladies” as he worked with other Founding Fathers on helping the colonies declare independence from Great Britain.^[i] The quest for women to gain the right to vote picked up steam in 1869, when Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone founded the American Woman Suffrage Association and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony established the National Woman Suffrage Association.^[ii] Although these early suffragists did not succeed in receiving enfranchisement with the Fifteenth Amendment, they continued to campaign for their voting rights and other progressive goals through the early 1910s. Some women did so under the umbrella of large national organizations. Others, hoping to escape the racism associated with the white female move for enfranchisement, advocated for policy change through the National Association of Colored Women and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.^[iii] Eight states had already granted women the right to vote by 1914, and women’s support of the war effort spurred women such as Alice Paul to advocate even more fiercely for their rights.^[iv] After World War I ended, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment on June 4, 1919, and ratified it over a year later, on August 18, 1920. The amendment reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”^[v]

World War I-era progressive movements for gender equality are generally not reflected in the sheet music of the time. Instead, women appear mainly as worrying or patriotic mothers and beautiful girlfriends. For the first case, “America Here’s My Boy: The Sentiment of Every American Mother,” by Andrew B. Sterling and Arthur Lange, is a representative example. The cover features a young man in an AEF uniform holding a bayonet. His mother stands to his left, one hand on his shoulder and one hand pointing towards him as if exhibiting his ability to serve “America.” The silhouette of the continental United States on which the two are superimposed underscores the mother’s patriotism.^[vi] Mary Earl’s “Cheer Up, Mother” features almost the exact same mother and son as “America Here’s My Boy,” although the mother in this case is significantly shorter than her son. Rather than displaying her son for the nation’s use, this mother holds onto him with both hands. He wears his pack and holds his gun ready, suggesting that she cannot stop him from leaving.^[vii]

“Don’t Try To Steal the Sweetheart of a Soldier” by Alfred Bryan, Van, and Schenck portrays one of the many beautiful girlfriends on World War I sheet music covers. A man in a suit holds a blonde young woman with round, rosy cheeks who wears a white dress. They seem to be in a garden, encircled by yellow roses. Out of the border around the two lovebirds emerges the silhouette of a soldier carrying a bayonet and standing near the mountains. The lyrics suggest that the silhouetted soldier and the man in the suit are not the same person: “Don’t try to steal the sweetheart of a soldier, / It’s up to you to play a manly part / Though he’s over there and she’s over here / Still she’s always in his heart.” The lyrics give no agency to the “sweetheart,” nor does she have any identity outside of their relationship; instead, she waits for her soldier to return and remains susceptible to seduction by men who have not gone off “to protect our liberty.”^[viii]

In “The Girls We Leave Behind” by Arthur F. Holt and William T. Pierson, the soldiers do not doubt their lovers’ faithfulness. The cover pictures five women in brightly colored clothes waving goodbye to a crowd of soldiers as they march to the harbor. The women wave their handkerchiefs, and the one closest to the foreground has a single tear on her cheek. Although the lyrics do not call into question the women’s fidelity, the song gives no thought to what the women might do while their lovers go “far away, across the ocean, / Just to show old Kaiser Bill a thing or two:” “So girls, good-bye! / Now don’t you cry, / We all must do our part.”^[ix]

One exception to these trends in the portrayal of women is Andrew B. Sterling and Alfred Solman’s “We’ll Keep Things Going ‘Till the Boys Come Home (Won’t We Girls?).” The cover features a woman speaking to throngs of other women in the middle of an urban street. All of them wear white, a color associated with the women’s suffrage movement. The lyrics presumably take place from the perspective of the street-corner speaker, who urges her audience to “show her Yankee grit” now that “the boys are going over.” She assures them that “a girl will take the place of ev’ry man,” from farms to factories to transportation to bars. The chorus makes fun of these women’s efforts to a certain extent, describing how “Aunt Priscilla” accidentally sends an elevator “through the roof” and “Mother” rips her overalls as she takes her husband’s place as a “steeple Jack.” Still, the chorus ends defiantly: “But we’ll keep things going till the boys come home.”^[x] While the song does not directly reference the women’s suffrage movement, it does reflect changing opportunities for women as the US joined World War I, even if the tension that accompanied those changes had to be defused through humor.

During World War I, women made major steps towards legal gender equality, ultimately winning the right to vote just two years after the armistice. Their progressive activism contrasts sharply with the mostly passive mothers and girlfriends of World War I sheet music. Sheet music covers also do not reflect the diversity of the women’s rights movement; all of the women on the sheet covers we surveyed are white. This suggests the relative unpopularity of progressive movements in mainstream politics and entertainment, despite their eventual success.

Selling World War I War Bonds Through Entertainment

Image Source: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

When the US joined World War I, it had no extra funding to cover the war effort. Rather than simply printing more money, Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo came up with a plan to both raise taxes and sell Liberty Bonds. The Federal Reserve and its team of volunteer sellers asked Americans to spend their money on Liberty Bonds rather than consumer goods. 16% of American families participated in the first round of bonds, and by 1919, 68% of laborers in American cities had purchased them.^[i]

Although the American public responded encouragingly to war bond sales, wartime entertainment began to include convincing people to purchase bonds. For example, the October 14, 1918, edition of American Daily Mail featured an article called, “U.S. Sees Rapid Growth of Liberty Loan Fever: Enthusiastic Scene in Theatre is Caused by President Wilson Buying First Bonds.” On the previous evening, Wilson attended the New Amsterdam Theatre’s production of The Girl Behind the Gun. During intermission, one of the actors sold bonds, and Wilson and a colonel in attendance both purchased bonds worth $2,000. According to the article, “the audience let itself loose at this. The cheers continued for several minutes.”^[ii] As the selling progressed, the president offered to autograph bonds worth over $1,000. Then, the actor selling bonds “interrupted the proceedings to ask whether the audience wanted the play resumed or the bond-selling to continue and the audience shouted ‘go on with the bonds.’”^[iii]

Erle Threlkeld’s 1918 song “Buy a Bond, Buy a Bond for Liberty: Help Our Boys Across the Sea” performed a similar propagandistic function. The cover features the Statue of Liberty and the American, French, Canadian, and Italian flags. The lyrics convey a great sense of urgency, heightened by music’s syncopation and march-like style: “Your Country calls on you today, Buy a Bond, Buy a Bond, Buy a Bond, She needs your aid and you can help this way, Buy a Bond, Buy a Bond, Buy a Bond.” Listeners should “hurry up” and do their “duty,” because “the boys across the pond” are “fighting” and “dying” for them.^[iv]

Another popular song of the time, “Dress Up Your Dollars in Khaki (And Help Win Democracy’s Fight)” by Richard Whiting and Lister R. Alwood reminds listeners that “our warriors are marching away / To join their commanders in France and in Flanders / To help the world win in this fray.” Lest non-soldiers think they are exempt from this call to pitch in, the song continues, “But Uncle Sam is calling the stay at homes” to “let a War Savings Stamp send your money to camp.” After all, “if we’re there with the dough sure the war bread will go.”^[v] Both songs make a direct connection between citizens’ support of the Liberty Bond effort and the Allied victory against the Central Powers.

Americans purchased seventeen billion dollars’ worth of Liberty Bonds between the time that McAdoo announced their availability and the time the war ended.^[vi] This is equivalent to over three hundred and eighty billion dollars in 2024. Bond sales at theater performances and songs such as “Buy a Bond, Buy a Bond for Liberty” and “Dress Up Your Dollars in Khaki” (among other forms of propaganda) contributed to the widespread success of this funding program.

Where’s My Father? Emotional Appeals in World War I “Daddy” Songs 

Despite the efforts of the Committee on Public Information, not all songs from World War I have a wholly positive outlook on the war. Several songwriters drew on images of children whose fathers were away in the war for inspiration for the following songs: “Let Us Say a Prayer for Daddy,” “Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight (For Her Daddy Over There),” and “Just a Baby’s Letter Found in No Man’s Land.” These songs, occasionally referred to as “Daddy songs,” take place from an outsider’s point of view rather than either the parent’s or the child’s perspective. Each song refers to these children as “babies” even though the images on their covers and ability to write or speak suggest that they are school-age. Furthermore, each child is female in these songs, as opposed to the little boy who dreams of soldiering in “Daddy I Want To Go.” The combination of poignant lyrics and the image of helpless little girls combine to generate sympathy and pathos in listeners, although the songs stop short of calling for an end to the war that is causing so much suffering.

            In 1917, Lew Schaeffer and Phil Leventhal published “Let Us Say a Prayer for Daddy.” The cover features a photograph of a little girl looking upward, her hands clasped in prayer. Above the photo, a caption names this song “the Latest & Greatest Daddy Song Ever Written.” The lyrics feature a mother and a baby “in a humble home” while “Daddy’s far across the sea.” The mother encourages the baby to “say a prayer for Daddy.” The baby has never met her father because of the war, but the mother assures her that “of us he is thinking constantly.” In the second verse, several years go by “slowly,” and the baby asks her mother, “Where is my daddy dear”? The song’s narrator lets listeners know that “Daddy’s life was through / And the angels he is near,” but the mother, not having yet received word of her husband’s death, assures her child yet again, “Our dad will soon be here.”^[i] Given that Schaeffer and Leventhal published this song in 1917, the same year that the US joined World War I, their glance a few years into the future to add to the song’s emotional appeal becomes somewhat profiteering or voyeuristic.

            The year of the Armistice saw even more songs about children looking for or missing their fathers. Sam M. Lewis, Joe Young, and M.K. Jerome’s 1918 “Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight (For Her Daddy Over There)” features a little blonde girl kneeling on her bed praying, hands folded and eyes closed. Her doll, which is missing a hand, lies next to her, suggesting a sense of abandonment and misuse. In the first verse, this song’s omniscient speaker has “heard the pray’rs of mothers” and “others” “for those who went away;” perhaps the speaker is an angel. The chorus pictures a “precious little tot” who prays for her father to “take care” after she says good-night to her “proud” mother. Concluding by emphasizing that she prays “for her daddy, ‘over there,’” the chorus references George M. Cohan’s wildly popular 1917 song “Over There.” [1] In the second verse, the speaker reflects that many people have greedy prayers that will not or should not be answered. As the song prepares to reenter the chorus, though, the speaker declares that the baby’s prayer for her father is “one that never waits.”^[ii] This optimism contrasts sharply with the ironically macabre tone of “Let Us Say a Prayer for Daddy.”

Balancing the futility of “Let Us Say a Prayer for Daddy” and the optimism of “Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight,” “Just a Baby’s Letter Found in No Man’s Land” by Bernie Grossman and Ray Lawrence presents an ambiguous image of the baby’s father’s future. The cover foregrounds an American Expeditionary Force (AEF) soldier in the middle of trench warfare, his bayonet leaning casually against his side, reading a letter that reads, “dear daddy, i love you daddy.” The letter is signed “baby.” Despite this symbol of domestic bliss, in the distance, soldiers charge towards a tank that fires on some unseen wreckage; barbed wire appears as well. The background is yellow, recalling the mustard gas that often filled the trenches. All of these perils could have taken the life of the soldier in question. Rather than centering on a specific scenario, the song’s lyrics favor ambiguous language: “Somebody wrote a letter to someone far away / Somebody waited for an answer all thro’ each long, long day.” Once the battle ends, “someone” picks up the letter in No Man’s Land. This letter, the speaker is confident, “to each eye brought a tear,” as the song was surely intended to do for listeners back home.^[iii]

            By figuring soldiers’ children as babies and weaving stories of families waiting in vain for their fathers’ return, these three “daddy” songs create deep emotional appeals. In none of these songs, though, does the speaker question why these fathers are leaving their children, nor does language around waste or shame ever appear. More research is needed into this genre of songs to determine whether the writers had ulterior motives besides generating profit off of audiences’ pathos. As sad as these songs are, they fall short of the genuine wartime protest that accompanied World War I, landing somewhere between calls for peace and nationalist dreams of victory and glory.