Immigrant Songs
With the New Cold War heating up, and American citizens under siege at home, it’s no small wonder that a Russian named Berlin can still claim to have composed this nation’s best-loved song. Born in the Russian Empire in 1888, the immigrant Irving Berlin wrote both the words and the music to “God Bless America.”
Berlin composed the song in the wartime year of 1918 in the only key he claimed to be able to play comfortably in: F-sharp. Noel Coward, a Brit, mistakenly thought that Berlin did everything in the typical beginner key of C major. Quite the contrary, said Berlin, who preferred to find his way mostly on the black notes, which are conveniently raised up like big braille buttons above the sameness of the ivories below.
A copy of Berlin’s song was among the sheet music left in my grandmother’s piano bench. She also had a “war edition” from 1917 of a sentimental love song entitled “K-K-K-Katy” that ventriloquized a stammering soldier’s suit of the eponymous soldier. It was composed by Army Song Leader Geoffrey O’Hara. Born in Canada and trained at the military academy there before abandoning it, he emigrated to the U.S. and the gold-paved streets of vaudeville. The Sensational Stammering Song Success Sung by the Soldiers and Sailors. O’Hara went on to teach at Columbia and, later, the University of South Dakota, which bestowed an honorary doctorate on him. Here’s O’Hara performing his most famous song on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1952.
The suave and self-effacing O’Hara delivers a charmingly nonchalant performance that combines the professorial and the vaudevillian. Many from more recent generations would surely condemn the lyric as a microaggression against stutterers. Some might also hear fear not just of love spurned but of likely death in a mad war. Others might allegorize the rat-a-tat-tat of the repeated consonants as the stammer of machine-gun fire across No Man’s Land.
On the back page of the single-fold half-folio of “K-K-K-Katy”—a small format adopted, says the publisher, “to co-operate with the Government and to conserve paper during the War, since “Save! Save! Save is the watchword today”—is an advertisement for some other wartime numbers. Among my favorite titles are the catchy “Just Like Washington Crossed the Delaware General Pershing Will Cross the Rhine,” the forthright “We Stopped Them at the Marne,” and “It’s a Long Way to Berlin, But We’ll Get There,” which turned out to be something of a hit when recorded by baritone Arthur Fields in 1917..
To judge from these songs, 1917 was an optimistic year in the United States, far from the realities of Europe: no lyrics about No-Man’s Land, mustard gas, or trench warfare. And no, they didn’t get to Berlin.
My grandmother also had a copy of one of the Second World War’s most popular anthems, at least as far as the U.S. was concerned: “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition and We’ll All Be Free”—words and music by Frank Loesser. The text was based on a phrase shouted by a chaplain named Howell Forgy aboard the U.S.S. New Orleans at Pearl Harbor. This song may be more hard-hitting than its World War I predecessors, but it, too, seems hopelessly quaint now.
One is tempted to think of those as simpler times, to imagine that if my grandparents were alive today, they would expect similarly upbeat songs like “Baghdad and Back by Christmas,” “Tango in Tehran,” “Daddy’s a Delta Force Hero,” “Dronesome Dove,” “I Only Have ICE for You.”
It’s a grimly fun parlor game to play, updating the words and melodies of 1917: “Rollover Mullah Omar, Uncle Sam’s Got Some News / The Donald’s Got a Daisy Cutter That’s Gonna Give the Taliban the Blues.”
The Department of Homeland Security also plays the game with heartless, gloating cruelty. In September, the agency posted on social media a horrifying video montage of shock troops storming houses and shackling people to the Pokémon theme song of “Gotta Catch ’Em All.”
@metrouk ‘Gotta Catch ‘Em All’ The Department of Homeland Security has shared a video of immigrants being arrested, spliced together with the Pokemon theme tune. The video has been viewed millions of times since it was posted yesterday, and many people have just one question… Is Nintendo going to do anything about this? #homelandsecurity #pokemon #usanews
In the old days, before the rise of such unapologetic sadism in song and image, a mixture of naïve optimism, patriotism, and bad taste was the go-to recipe for propagandistic war music, the grisly business ahead heralded by light, pattering melodies, imminently danceable rhythms, and bolstering harmonies.
This is what America had come to expect from the music that accompanies us to wars. Tin Pan Alley would hardly have welcomed a lyric such as Wilfred Owen’s “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” set by Benjamin Britten in his War Requiem of 1962. The military has long recognized the destabilizing power of song. The Army of the Potomac banned the singing of the popular “When This Cruel War Is Over” midway through the American Civil War.
Although there have been only very occasional eruptions of the worldwide War on Terror on American soil, the surge in nativist fury over the past twenty-five years has meant that Berlin’s “God Bless America” has infiltrated every corner of civic musical life since September 11, 2001. Already in that year, the song was heard in the seventh-inning stretch of Game 7 of the World Series; Madonna did it on her Drowned World Tour; and aged British rock stars got into the act as they staggered around Madison Square Garden. The song has secured a sacred place in the Super Bowl’s pre-kickoff ritual.
Berlin first concocted “God Bless America” in 1918 as a chorus to one of his musicals, then exhumed it for Kate Smith in 1938 in advance of the Second World War. It is a song whose harmonic and melodic profile—particularly the goose-stepping bass line of the chorus—has always reminded me of the marginally more dreadful “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” a hymn extruded from Arthur Sullivan on a day off from the Savoy Theatre. Yet the opening of “God Bless America” was apparently lifted by Berlin from a Jewish tune circulating on the Lower East Side during his youth.
It has to be admitted that “God Bless America” is more singable than the ungainly “Star-Spangled Banner,” whose melody has never shaken its origins as a reeling English drinking song. Many prefer Berlin’s nationalist hymn to the similarly derivative “America,” which takes its melody from the British national anthem “God Save the King.”
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the U.S. Army bands were already busy with Berlin’s anthem, and it has become a patriotic, anti-terror warhorse. On October 4 and 5 of 2001, the Army’s marquee band traveled to New York, where the group received a rapturous reception at their Lincoln Center concert. The Army Chorus, with soloist tenor Staff Sgt. Steve Cramer, sang “A Hero for Today” on the Today Show, with the audience in Rockefeller Center Plaza breaking into a chant of “U.S.A., U.S.A.” before the last of these rousing strains had faded. Later that day, Sergeant First Class Bob McDonald sang “God Bless America” at Ground Zero, describing how “the whole place had a sacred feel to it. It’s a burial ground with an element of otherworldliness. There was also an element of humanity that was so strong.”
Donald Trump and J.D. Vance did a bizarre duet on the song this past Veterans Day, the vice president exhaling his way through the hymn, while the president managed the title salvo, then opened his mouth just few times through the rest of the number, like a guppy low on oxygen.
The early phases of war are often filled with musical bluster and banality. A lone tenor emitting the strains of “God Bless America” over the hallowed hole in Lower Manhattan was yet more proof of the centrality of kitsch in propaganda, the remarkable tale of a penny sheet pulled up by its bootstraps from Tin Pan Alley to the National Mall and a central position in the American liturgy.
A veteran of the armed services, Berlin was thrilled that his song bolstered spirits in World War II. He also helped to engineer the weaponization of “God Bless America” over the long span of his life, as can be seen and heard during his 1968 appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, six days before the composer’s eightieth birthday. Berlin would live on for another twenty years, making it to 101.
Elegantly clad in a tuxedo, Berlin sings his most famous creation with only a gentle piano accompanying him. The composer’s voice is quiet, grainy, and full of air. Fragile but resolute, this old man’s voice does not surrender to age. When Berlin goes high in his range at the close, the power recedes still further from his voice, wafted aloft and away by nostalgia. It’s as if he’s caressing his child—or the memory of that child. His voice rises up as his poetry takes in the glorious expanse of America, Berlin’s adopted land, “From the mountains to the prairies …” At the apex of the melody, his voice mists into thin air in a stirring evocation of the “oceans white with the foam.”
One could almost be brought to tears, and doubtless many were, as the afterglow of the song lingers in Berlin’s throat, his head cocked prayerfully to one side. The audience applauds as a trumpet call is heard, and the curtain (chiffon rather than iron) behind Berlin opens to reveal two choral battalions of crisply uniformed Boy and Girl Scouts on steep risers. As visual and musical symbols, these children serve the same purpose as communist Young Pioneers or members of a fascist youth group. At the rousing choral conclusion—the embodiment of martial might, especially coming directly after Berlin’s sentimental solo—the composer extends his arms in a kind of benediction. On the other side of the world, the Tet Offensive had kicked into high gear that very day.
The teetering American empire has started again into its foreign misadventures even as it sacks its own cities. In the battle against Berlin’s hymn and the ranks of propagandistic song that surround it, truthful music will be a vital weapon of dissent in the endless, borderless War on Kitsch.
The post Immigrant Songs appeared first on CounterPunch.org.