Music plays a central role in how we remember many of the defining moments in our life. It can shape our perspectives as individuals, but also as a society. This is as true in war as it is in peace.
Over the centuries many pieces of music have become intrinsically associated with periods of war and conflict. Today marks the 98th anniversary of the armistice that officially ended the First World War and would eventually give rise to what we recognize today as Remembrance Day, in honour of those who fought in that war and all those who have followed in the many wars since.
Today, on Remembrance Day, we look at some of the pieces of music which became emblematic of the wars of their era.
Loch Lomond
An old Scots/Gaelic song about a captured soldier (perhaps during the Jacobite Uprising of 1745) lamenting his imminent death and mourning never seeing either his love or his homeland again. The song has roots that stretch back far beyond the modern era, but the tone of melancholy tinged with stoic fatalism will become themes common throughout songs of this nature from the British Isles.
And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda
Written 56 years after the landing at Gallipoli, the song recounts the enrollment and dismemberment of a young Australian soldier while fighting with the ANZAC forces against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. It stands today as one of the most recognizable and popular anti-war folk songs.
It’s A Long Way to Tipperary
A popular song quickly associated with the British soldiers of the First World War, attributed first to an Irish regiment of the Connaught Rangers, the song taps into the longing for home and being anywhere but the war. It was soon embraced by the more fervent supporters of the war effort and associated with soldiers’ esprit de corps in performing their patriotic duty.
Pack All Your Troubles (in your old kit bag)
Originally released in 1915, another in a line of songs aimed at encouraging recruitment and improving morale for the war effort. A popular music hall song in its day which highlights the naïve adventurism associated with the early war effort.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2ktNsYMaag
Over There
America’s turn at patriotic jingles, best portrayed in the film Yankee Doodle Dandy with James Cagney, exhorts young men across the US to enlist in the war effort. Lacking the more stoic romanticization of the British tradition, it is a uniquely American interpretation of an old musical propaganda tool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjq_HZg9YmY
Slavic Woman’s Farewell (Farewell of Slavianka)
Russian marching song from the First World War, it was written first to commemorate the women who marched with their husbands and loved ones on their way to the Balkan War in 1912. In tone and mood it is arguably closer to the marching songs of Britain than the United States as it addresses the homesickness of soldiers headed to the front through the particular lens of Russian cultural history.
Last Post
Perhaps one of the most iconic military songs, it is played every Remembrance Day in Canada. Originally intended as a call to signal that the fighting was over for the day or that the final sentry had been inspected and camp was secure for the night. It has since become closely associated with recognizing the fallen dead and missing throughout the UK and Commonwealth countries.
Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs Of Dover
Vera Lynn’s best-known song, Bluebirds balances the melancholy captured during the Battle of Britain during World War II when Britain was alone in the war with a quiet strength of certainty in the eventual return of peace and a victorious England. Bluebirds refers to the RAF and RCAF pilots who held the Germans at bay while the nation recuperated from the materiel losses of Dunkirk and Churchill negotiated an arms trade with Roosevelt as well as the potential for the US to enter the war. The implied lament within Lynn’s words echo Churchill’s statement that “never was so much owed by so many to so few”.
We’ll Meet Again
Another Vera Lynn standard, and another song emblematic of the Second World War as it gently straddles the sadness of saying farewell to a loved one while looking forward to a day of reunion. Despite being recorded in 1939 at the very beginning of the war, it is more closely associated with the American experience of the Second World War (effectively beginning in 1942). Its common usage in various celebrity and media farewells has somewhat diminished the wartime associations.
I’ll Be Home For Christmas
Bing Crosby’s 1943 song dedicated to soldiers serving overseas has become a season standard. The song, perhaps unintentionally, draws upon the First World War propaganda phrase “Home by Christmas”, a term later used in cynical reference to the war’s unceasing stagnancy. As with Vera Lynn’s, Crosby captures here that juxtaposition of trying to console a loved one and betraying one’s own longing for home and happier times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6TMTfvKeBc
Soldier’s Last Letter
Written by Ernest Tubb while he was serving in the Pacific in 1944, this song is more personal and heartfelt than many of its contemporaries. Perhaps on account of Tubb’s first-hand experience, there is no mention of valour, glory or victory. The letter being directed to the soldier’s mother is reminiscent of the countless accounts of dying soldiers, from nearly any era in history, crying out for their mothers in their death throes. It also focuses on the particular method that brought either welcome news or heralded the tragedy of a loved one’s passing: the letter home.
Drive On
An example of Cash’s artistic genius, he writes from the perspective of a veteran of the Vietnam War complete with local references and the unique experiences of those who fought in that war. The song mentions the fear heading into a fight, the closeness of one’s comrades, the trauma of loss and the distance that separated the veterans from their families upon returning. The song stands out from many others about Vietnam in that it does not parade violent anger at an establishment or seek to shock the listener with gory details, rather it echoes the struggle of men returning home from a deeply traumatic conflict who must continue on with life.
Born on the Fourth of July
Among the many protest songs that came from the Vietnam War, Tom Paxton’s song is written from the memoirs of veteran Ron Kovic who was paralyzed from the chest down when he was wounded in duty. Kovic became a fervent protester of the Vietnam War, and later of both the Gulf and Iraq wars.
For What It’s Worth
Originally inspired by a curfew enforcement law on Sunset Strip in 1966, the song later began to be applied to the more generalized civil disobedience movement of the 60s and eventually was applied to the Vietnam protest. Different in tone and perspective than many of the other songs here, this is primarily from the perspective of civilians.
Russians
The early 80s saw a series of protest songs directed towards the Cold War and the confrontational tone taken by both Ronald Reagan and Nikita Kruschev. Perhaps inspired by the protest songs of the 60s and 70s, and cynical towards anti-communist messages after decades of proxy-wars in South Asia and Central America, artists began to highlight the apocalyptic potential of a direct conflict between nuclear-armed combatants. Perhaps as a result of the consequences songs at this time often tended to reflect in equal measure the lives on either side of the conflict. At the same time, Sting here places an element of guilt upon the heads of both states that the lives of all our children depend on their understanding that a war of this magnitude in ultimately unwinnable and catastrophic to all, combatants and innocent alike.
Leningrad
Alternating between a personal account of growing up in the US during the initial paranoid response to Soviet Russia (“in McCarthy time” in the song) and the life of a child of born into Stalinist post-Second World War Russia, the song echoes the strong anti-war message in the shadows of the nuclear arms race of many others during this time. Where it differs is in the perspective taken of the feared Russian, humanizing him to a far greater degree than the more relatable American child, in this case Joel himself. He highlights how the differences and fear fell away like leaves in fall when the two sides met face to face.
Day After Tomorrow
Tom Waits’ song is something of a culmination of the general development we have seen in many wartime songs. Written from the perspective of an American soldier serving in the Middle East, he is returning home and facing now the many questions that have arisen as his experiences have left him jaded now. He longs for the mundane and simple things in life, raking leaves and shovelling snow. The song is anti-war in the most fundamental sense, hinting at the futility of conflict for arcane or abstract purposes. Waits, like Johnny Cash, has the peculiar ability to portray a perspective that is stripped of romanticization and emotional histrionics while still filling the listener with empathy and pathos.
Green Fields of France
Another of Eric Bogle’s (The Band Played Waltzing Matilda) anti-war songs from the 70s, and perhaps a fitting bookend to those preceding it today. The song laments the loss of life by a young man killed in the First World War, imagining everything that he left behind and lost as a poetic reflection on how little we actually know about the hundreds of thousands of men buried in these cemeteries across Europe. Returning to Bogle’s more heart-rending tendencies, the song empathizes with the slain solder from the opening verse. Once again, the futility and destruction of war are key themes, but also hints at the way many of these men died, alone despite their vast numbers and otherwise unnoticed as a result of the terrible extent of the carnage.
We frame much of our culture and lives through music. It reflects what we value as a society, in some cases it helps to project a sense of unease or frustration at our social order or place in history. It can be gaudy, giddy, light-hearted. It can also be morose, mournful and filled with regret and compassion.
This November 11th marks the 98th anniversary of the cessation of hostilities in the Great War (1914 – 1918) and this past summer was the 100th anniversary of the Somme offensive, an engagement that since has been described as the graveyard of armies as a result of the grotesque numbers of men lost. Before even beginning the Somme offensive on July 1st of 1916, the combined losses of both Allied and Central powers were staggering and escalating, yet the Allied generals committed to the plan to attack the German lines at this point.
Britain would lose 19, 240 men dead on the first day.
The active offensive on the Somme closed on November 18th 1916, by which time another estimated 1,666,289 men were added as casualties, 310,486 men dead on both sides of the trenches.
Music opens our hearts to the outside world and gives voice to everything inside us that remains unspoken so that decades or even centuries later we can listen and feel as intensely as if we had been there ourselves. Perhaps this is why some of the music we find most moving during times of mourning are instrumental – overcome by empathy we simply lack the words.
The Future of the Past
We are approaching the centennial of the end of the First World War in two years’ time and I believe we will have to use that moment to better examine how we observe this day and it’s legacy on our culture. It is my opinion that the perceptions of war and remembrance have begun to grow out of balance and it will be up to a younger generation to find a place for memorials such as this in their world view. Within a generation the grandchildren of the men who fought in the Great War will have passed away and it will be incumbent upon those who, hopefully, will have grown up without knowing a major international conflict to take up the lessons of those long-dead and continue their efforts to keep any future generations from having to know such horror.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
