You were fixing your barbed wire, when we opened rapid-fire.
So if you want to see your Vater in the Vaterland,
Keep your head down, Fritzie boy!”
I played it over and over throughout that day. And many times thereafter.
A few years later, at another flea market on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I came upon a copy of the sheet music to “Keep Your Head Down, Fritzie Boy.” It was, to me at that moment, an astonishing discovery. The artwork was fairly crude—a young doughboy standing in uniform and holding a bayonet, rosy-cheeked and beaming, while other doughboys duke it out with Fritzie in the trenches behind him—but the object itself was, somehow, beautiful. I couldn’t believe I had come across it. The record was extremely entertaining but also seemed a common artifact to me; this piece of sheet music struck me as exceedingly rare.
Actually, I had it backwards. World War I coincided with the apex of the American music-publishing industry, which was then known (and still is, by some) as Tin Pan Alley. Tin Pan Alley was, in fact, a real and specific place, though not an alley—actually, it was a stretch of West Twenty-eighth Street in Manhattan, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, where a great many music publishers had their offices. It is not known why so many of them converged upon the same spot (a situation that presumably would have made intellectual espionage and theft a great deal easier), nor is it known why the place was nicknamed Tin Pan Alley (some have speculated that the term is a derogatory reference to the cacophonous effect of many different pianos playing many different songs at once). But to say that this little stretch of side street in a neighborhood that doesn’t even have a name these days was once the epicenter of American music—maybe even culture—is defensible hyperbole. No one today seems to know exactly how many music-publishing houses were clustered there in 1917, but it was big business—the biggest. It made some men tremendously rich.
To really understand the importance of Tin Pan Alley, we have to reexamine our definitions of both “music” and “publishing.” Yes, publishing houses bought the rights to songs peddled by itinerant songwriters, or “pluggers”; but more often, they wrote their own songs, sometimes three or four a day. Some houses were known to hang out signs declaring songs written to order!, and they meant it. And that’s where our reexamination of the term “music” comes in, because in those days, music was much more than merely entertainment: It was news. If something big happened—a great ship sank, or a train wreck occurred, or someone new was elected president or governor, or the stock market took a dip, or someone was assassinated—people started writing songs about it immediately, and sheet music hit the stores before the headlines had cleared the newspapers. And if something really, really big happened—like, say, America entered the greatest war the planet had ever seen—well, a lot of people started writing a lot of songs, and they didn’t stop for a long time. There was a lot to tell.
I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy.
Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?
Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,
It’s time to lay the sword and gun away.
There’d be no war today, if mothers all would say,
“I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.”
“I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” written by Alfred Bryan and Al Piantadosi, was one of the biggest hits of 1915. At a time when reports of horrific bloodletting Over There occupied the front pages of American newspapers every day, an awful lot of people Over Here wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. Some were pacifists. Some were Irish, who had no desire to fight for (and alongside) the British. Some were Russian Jews, who had fled the czar’s anti-Semitic regime and had no desire to go off and fight for the man. Some were Austrian or Hungarian and remembered their old emperor, and their empire, fondly; a great many were German, or at least of German descent (at the time, more Americans could trace their ancestors to Germany than to any other country), and resented being characterized as barbarians and Huns. And a great many more just thought the whole bloody thing had absolutely nothing to do with them. “If They Want to Fight, All Right,” declared another song title from 1915, “but ‘Neutral’ Is My Middle Name.”
It wasn’t a universal sentiment; many sympathized with “Wake Up, America!” which became a hit the following year. Must we be laughed at, America / while our swords turn weak with rust? it asked. Let us pray, God, for peace, but peace with honor / But let’s get ready to answer duty’s call. Still, there was room, in 1916’s America, for honest differences of opinion.
In April 1917, though, that all changed suddenly. “Uncle Sam’s Awake” declared a 1917 response to 1916’s musical plea; “America, Here’s My Boy” announced another title from 1917, rebuking 1915’s pacifist (or at least isolationist) hit. Suddenly, if you weren’t for the war, you were against America. Like most of America’s newspapers and politicians, its songwriters fell in line, whether because they actually believed it or simply believed it was good for business. I have come across many hundreds of pieces of World War I sheet music, but I have never seen one published after 1916 that didn’t support the war. I doubt such a thing exists. And believe me, there is a bottomless well of American World War I sheet music.
In the twenty-aughts, it would be: Do this, or don’t do that, and the terrorists win. In the late nineteen-teens, the terrorist, as far as Americans were concerned, was Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albrecht von Preussen, better known as Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia, known better still as Kaiser Bill, Billy, Willie, or, simply, the Kaiser. This was the man, after all, who had started the war so he could conquer and own the world, who had personally ordered the sinking of the Lusitania, the rape and destruction of Belgium, and all kinds of atrocities in la belle France. Or so it was said, anyway. Americans just hated the man; a popular poster of the day portrayed him as a rabid gorilla wading onto an American shore wearing a spiked helmet (the Germans called it a Pickelhaube) labeled “militarism” while clutching a defiled maiden in one hand and a club labeled Kultur (the German word for “civilization”) in the other, the charred ruins of Paris smoldering behind him, all under the slogan: DESTROY THIS MAD BRUTE. ENLIST.
Grotesque as this all might seem to us nearly a century later, it must be said that the Kaiser didn’t exactly do much to help his image Over Here, or, come to think of it, anywhere. He was bellicose, petulant, blustering, racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, paranoid, egomaniacal, megalomaniacal, conniving, treacherous, greedy, and possessed of powerful inferiority and persecution complexes. He rarely appeared in public in civilian clothes, favoring some or other extravagant military uniform. His left arm, damaged at birth in a complicated breech delivery, was withered and virtually useless; during public appearances he kept it either behind his back or awkwardly posed in front and rigidly clutching some object, creating the impression that he was up to something. And he wore his thick, stiff mustache turned straight up at the ends. Few people can pull that look off; he wasn’t one of them.
Still, I don’t think he quite deserved the battering he took in Tin Pan Alley, where he quickly became the man songwriters—and, by extension, the American people—loved to hate. Violently. Savagely. So much so that in some of their hands, the war to Make the World Safe for Democracy became the war to capture the Kaiser, do all kinds of unspeakable but horribly painful things to him, and then kill him. Several times, if possible.
You said you’d plaster Paris with your Hindenburg machine / but now it looks as if you’re on the road to Paris Green, declares one song, “The Worst Is Yet to Come” by Sam M. Lewis, Joe Young, and Bert Grant. Not particularly menacing (or, for that matter, catchy), but the sheet music is adorned with a cover illustration of the Kaiser chained to a dungeon wall, cowering on a cot under a tattered blanket, while a strapping young doughboy, perched on the mattress with one foot on the Kaiser�
��s chest, jabs a bayonet into the old man’s face. That alone must have sold a few copies.
In many other cases, the title was probably enough. “We’re Going to Hang the Kaiser Under the Linden Tree.” “The USA Will Lay the Kaiser Away.” “When the Yankees Yank the Kaiser off His Throne.” “We’ll Lick the Kaiser If It Takes Us Twenty Years.” “We Are Out for the Scalp of Mister Kaiser Man.” “We’re All Going Calling On the Kaiser.” (And we’ll bring him something good / A kimono made of wood.) “The Kaiser Wanted More Territory, So We Gave Him Hell.” (Soon he’ll sit on another throne / where he’s sure to be right at home / Nice red uniform, and horns upon his dome.) “I’d Like to See the Kaiser with a Lily in His Hand.” Which is to say: embalmed and laid out in that kimono made of wood.
The cover for “We’ll All Make Billy Pay the Bill He Owes” calls it “An Impressive War Song with a Punch in Every Line.” I’m not sure I agree, though I really like the cover art, which features a stern Uncle Sam holding out, at arm’s length, a document addressed to “Mr. Bill Hohenzollern” that reads: “Pay to the Order of the Allies, Suitable Indemnities to All Warring Nations and America’s Demands, France’s Demands, England’s Demands, Belgium’s Demands, Italian Demands, Serbia’s Demands, Portugal’s Demands . . .” (Portugal?) The Kaiser’s expression betrays what would, decades later, become known as sticker shock.
My favorite song of this ilk, though, is “When the Kaiser Does the Goose-Step to a Good Old American Rag” by Jack Frost (really) and Harold Neander. They’ll play it jerky / and make Bill “walk turkey” / and salute our grand old flag, the song promises. There’ll be a jazz band from Dixie / and Bill won’t dare say “Nix-ie,” / when the Yankees say, “Come, William, dance that drag.” Not only does it manage to work in all kinds of contemporary musical references—everything from John Philip Sousa to the Six Brown Brothers (a vaudeville saxophone ensemble from Canada) to Alexander’s Ragtime Band—but the song actually robs the Kaiser of something more precious to him than life: his dignity. Knowing what little I do about Wilhelm II, I suspect he might just rather have been hanged under the linden tree—particularly if, as the cover art speculates, he was forced to dance by being jabbed in the tuchus by bayonets.
Wilhelm II may have served as a lightning rod on Tin Pan Alley, but his country—and its people—were not spared, either. “Germany, You’ll Soon Be No Man’s Land.” “It’s a Long Way to Berlin but We’ll Get There.” “We Don’t Want the Bacon—What We Want Is a Piece of the Rhine!” “When We Wind Up the Watch on the Rhine.” “We’ll Sing ‘Hail! Hail! The Gang’s All Here’ on the Sidewalks of Berlin.” “We’ll Knock the Heligo—into Heligo—out of Heligoland” even tried to teach Americans a little geography. “Hunting the Hun,” by Howard E. Rogers and Archie Gottler, featured a cartoonish cover illustration of the Yanks luring hapless Germans across No Man’s Land—and into the stockade—with a barrel of “pilsner beer,” a steaming plate of sauerkraut, and an even more aromatic Teutonic delicacy:
You can capture them with ease
All you need is just a little limburger cheese.
Give ’em one little smell, they come out with a yell.
Then your work is done.
When they start to advance, shoot ’em in the pants.
That’s the game called Hunting the Hun.
It’s tempting, if you’ve ever smelled Limburger cheese, to joke that you’d be shooting the Huns in the back, since the smell would make anyone flee; but by 1918, the war had taken its toll, and most Germans didn’t have nearly enough to eat.
For pure, brazen bravado, though, you can’t beat a 1918 composition by J. Keirn Brennan and Ernest R. Ball. The lyrics aren’t what you’d call clever:
Say, Fritz, we knew we’d give you fits.
With a million Yankee hits, we blew you into bits.
Hey, Fritz, when you met Yankee wits,
We pounded you until you knew you had to call it quits.
The cover art features—who else?—Uncle Sam, pointing right at you, though instead of James Montgomery Flagg’s famously stern “I Want You” Uncle Sam, this one seems to be stifling a chuckle behind his cocky grin. But what really makes this song special is its title: “You Can’t Beat Us, For We’ve Never Lost a War.”
Clearly, Uncle Sam is a Yankee, in every sense of the word.
For every anti-German song, you’ll find another, equally passionate, pro-French song. Where the former were zippy, and often witty, the latter tended to be maudlin dirges. You wouldn’t dance to them.
Lafayette, we hear you calling, Layfayette, ’tis not in vain
That the tears of France are falling, we will help her to smile again.
For a friend in need is a friend in deed, do not think we shall ever forget.
Lafayette, we hear you calling, we are coming, Lafayette.
Like Mary Earl did in “Lafayette (We Hear You Calling),” many pluggers followed the lead of General Pershing, who, shortly after arriving in France in June, 1917, made a special pilgrimage to the grave of George Washington’s old aide-de-camp. (It was actually Pershing’s aide-de-camp, Colonel Charles E. Stanton, who uttered the famous line that has since been attributed to his boss: “Lafayette, we are here.”) Never mind the fact that America owed a similar debt to Germany, whence hailed the likes of General von Steuben and Baron de Kalb, men who arguably played an even greater role in America’s military victory over Britain than had the Marquis de Lafayette. Suddenly, Americans collectively remembered that Lafayette was their man, that they owed him, and that the time had come to repay that debt by sailing over and saving his descendants’ collective derrières. And even, perhaps, a bit more, as Jack Coogan promises in “France, We’ll Rebuild Your Towns for You”:
First we’ll send our sons and our mighty guns,
Then vic’try will come from above.
We will re-plant each field, so it will yield
The fruits of our brotherly love.
All your shattered dreams we’ll mend
In America you’ll find a friend
And we’ll send our gold across the ocean blue.
France, we’ll rebuild your towns for you.
Lafayette wasn’t the only dead French soldier summoned back to duty on Tin Pan Alley, either:
Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc, do your eyes from the skies see the foe?
Don’t you see the drooping Fleur-de-lis? Can’t you hear the tears of Normandy?
Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc, let your spirit guide us through.
Come lead your France to victory; Joan of Arc, they are calling you.
—“Joan of Arc, They Are Calling You” by Alfred Bryan, Willie Weston, and Jack Wells
While many of the songs that deal with France wallow in that country’s tremendous pool of suffering, others manage to find the bright side. France, after all, is full of French girls. It didn’t matter that they couldn’t speak English—in fact, as songs like “And He’d Say Ooh-La-La! Wee-Wee!,” and “Wee, Wee, Marie (Will You Do Zis for Me)” make plain, the linguistic differences might even have been a plus. And it wasn’t just doughboys who succumbed to the charms of their hosts:
Rosie Green was a village queen who enlisted as a nurse.
She waited for a chance, and left for France with an ambulance.
Rosie Green met a chap named Jean, a soldier from Paree.
When he said “Par-le-vous, my pet,”
She said, “I will, but not just yet.”
—“Oh! Frenchy” by Sam Ehrlich and Con Conrad
If you must go off to war, France, it seems, is as good a place as any—for gander and goose.
Looking back on it, it appears that everyone was just playing catch-up. The best song of the whole singin’ war was written right at the start.
Maybe it had to be that way. The most popular song of the war in England was written two years before the first shot was fired. “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary” isn’t even about war; it’s about an unsophisticated Irishman w
ho goes off to London but, despite the excitement of the place, can’t stop thinking about home, and about the girl he left behind. Like many songs of the day, its writers, Jack Judge and Harry Williams, built “Tipperary” upon a pejorative ethnic stereotype—in this case, that the Irish are, shall we say, a simple people:
Paddy wrote a letter to his Irish Molly O’,
Saying “Should you not receive it, write and let me know!
If I make mistakes in ‘spelling,’ Molly, dear,” said he,
“Remember, it’s the pen that’s bad, don’t lay the blame on me.”
Strangely, it was an Irish regiment, the Connaught Rangers, that first adopted it as a marching song; London Daily Mail war correspondent George Curnock reported seeing them do so in northern France in August, 1914, just a couple of weeks after the war began. By the end of the war, just about every soldier in Europe knew it.
The Last of the Doughboys Page 11