Posted on 06/02/2024 1:44:32 PM PDT by Twotone
I hadn't intended to write about war songs this week. But I was struck by some of the responses to yesterday's D-Day special, and, as always, impressed by the resilience of the accompanying music. It's eighty years since June 6th 1944, four score and six since the first troops shipped out, and yet that sound remains unmistakeable. For those who were there, a few bars of "White Cliffs of Dover" will always mean a crowded railway platform in East Anglia as the troop train pulls out, and a snatch of "Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner" will always evoke the final pub singalong of the evening on your last night of leave...
Tin Pan Alley didn't get the First World War quite right. There were chin-up songs ("Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag") and gung-ho rousers ("Over There") but most everything else wore its opportunism rather too obviously - "Goodbye Broadway, Hello France", "The Beast Of Berlin (We're Going To Get Him)"... The trick was to take the song forms you peddled in peacetime and add a topical twist, so we had the wartime mother song - "So Long, Mother" - and the wartime telephone song - "Hello, Central, Give Me No Man's Land". In 1939, it looked as if the music business was going to make the same mistake all over again: The big song the British Expeditionary Force would be marching off to was supposed to be "We're Going To Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfried Line", a song whose breezy confidence didn't survive first contact with the enemy:
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
You’re welcome. I’ve always liked those two songs because they deal specifically with the U.S. G.I.
Great song! Always makes me think of “Dr. Strangelove.”
This is the version featured in the movie:
We'll Meet Again--Vera Lynn (1953)
Love That Bomb--Dr. Strangelove & the Fallouts (1964)
The one I always think of, and reminds me of all the faces I can’t see anymore.
I’ll Be Seeing You
Bing’s version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQqkDEDxa9s
Dick Todd (1st recording)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdZSwnDuLA0
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