"Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" vs. "White Christmas": Two Songs Loved by the WWII GIs

As squadrons of Japanese planes approached the island of Oahu on the morning of December 7^th, 1941, they were poised to attack a nation divided. Approximately 80 percent of the American public hoped to completely avoid what they termed “The European War.” Notable among the reasons for this hesitation was recollections of the Bonus Army March of 1932, when American veterans of the First World War marched on Washington to request their promised military bonuses early but were forcibly removed. The song, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime,” written a few months later, gave voice to their sense of abandonment.

So why should America help Europe again?

Then the bombs fell and 2,400+ US military personnel were killed as well as 50 civilians. Imperial Japan did not intentionally target the general population, but Americans, reeling in shock, didn’t know that. Invasion fears were soon replaced with a determination to fight back and the national hesitation regarding involvement in the war all but dissipated as half a million young Americans signed up for the military.

The bitterness of the WWI veterans was forgotten as the new generation drew inspiration from the heroes of that war as well as the song that had roused the nation to fight in 1917: George M. Cohan’s “Over There.”

Despite this rush of patriotic enthusiasm, the United States Office of War Information, the OWI, felt compelled to find the “Over There” for this new war, a song that would maintain enthusiastic participation long after the initial rush of excitement began to ebb, a song that would keep the boys signing up and their families supporting them while they endured the privations of war on the homefront.

American songwriters responded to the attack—and to the government’s challenge---with a flurry of activity, producing more than 1,000 anti-Axis songs in the weeks following Pearl Harbor:

For instance:

“We’ll always remember Pearl Harbor”

“Let’s put the axe to the Axis”

“The Sun Will Soon be Setting for the Land of the Rising Sun”

“To be Specific, it’s Our Pacific”

“Let’s Knock the Hit out of Hitler”

And my personal favorite:

“Put the Heat on Hitler, Muss up Mussolini, and Tie a Can to Japan.”

Obviously, none of these caught on in a big way.

“We Did it Before and We Can Do it Again,” written on December 7^th, 1941, enjoyed some early success, but within the year, it was eclipsed. Four months following Pearl Harbor, Frank Loesser, lyricist to Hoagy Charmichael’s “Heart and Soul,” wrote the following in a letter to his wife: “I have a title…which is a quotation from a news story a few months ago---a sentence supposedly spoken by a brave army chaplain.” The story that had inspired Loesser, as it was initially reported, went like this:

“As sailors boiled from below decks of a US Navy warship to fight off low flying Japanese planes, Chaplain William McGuire left his altar where it stood and ran to a gun station where one of the gunners had been killed and another wounded. In the unholy uproar of that torrent of bombs, Chaplain McGuire shouted his now famous words: “I just got one of them!! Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition!!”

That’s not exactly what happened Months later when Chaplain McGuire was interviewed by LIFE Magazine, he admitted he didn’t even recall saying those words, and if he had, he said, “Nobody could have heard me in the din of battle.”

But Loesser, who wrote the song long before the article came out, seized on the initial story, creating the following lyrics to tell the mythical tale:

Down went the gunner, a bullet was his fate.

Down went the gunner, and then the gunner’s mate.

Up jumped the sky pilot, gave the boys a look,

And manned the gun himself as he laid aside the book, shouting

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition and we’ll all stay free.

This song debuted in NYC at the famed Leon and Eddie’s Nightclub sometime in 1942, recorded by the Merry Macs that same year, recorded by Kay Kyser and his orchestra in 1943. One million disks of Kyser’s recording sold as did one million additional copies of other artists’ recordings.

The OWI felt they had found their song, so much so that they prohibited it being broadcast more than once every four hours, hoping to extend its galvanizing power—they didn’t want enthusiasm for the song to wane during what they suspected was going to be a long war.

But years before Frank Loesser’s big hit galvanized America, Irving Berlin had already written the takeaway song of the war.

“White Christmas” was heralded on a Monday morning, January 8^th, 1940, when its creator rushed into his office uncharacteristically early and said to his assistant, “I want you to take down a song I wrote over the weekend. Not only is it the best song I ever wrote, it’s the best song anybody ever wrote.”

But if it had been born that January morning, “White Christmas” had been gestating since mid-1938, when Berlin jotted down its title and threw it into his pile of ideas he referred to collectively as “the trunk.” “White Christmas” was originally intended to be a loud, rousing finale sung by a full chorus in a never-produced musical called The Crystal Ball.

So when Berlin blew into his office claiming to have written a song over the weekend, it might have been more accurate to say that he pulled something out of “the trunk” and tinkered with it, bringing it to a completed state.

Berlin kept “White Christmas” a secret but he had great plans for it. In April 1940, he met with a Hollywood director, presenting a film idea that would feature a song and dance man whose country inn was open only on holidays. And Berlin insisted that Bing Crosby—the American voice of Christmas since his 1935 recordings of “Adeste Fidelis” and “Silent Night”— would star in the film.

On Christmas Eve 1941, 17 days following the Pearl Harbor attack, Bing Crosby debuted “White Christmas” live on the radio. The public can be forgiven for not registering the song at the time—they were gearing up for a war. And much to Berlin’s disappointment, “White Christmas” also did not register when Holiday Inn premiered in NYC in August 1942.

But the following month, Billboard reported that the song was climbing the charts. By December, Crosby’s recording had sold 2 million disks.

Why was that? Berlin claimed to know: “The boys overseas are buying it.”

His song reached the boys 1) through the Armed Forces Radio request programs. 2) played on the jukeboxes in USO halls and PX stores. 3) Crosby’s recording was also included in recreation kits received by the young men in uniform.

While entertaining the troops during the war with the USO, Crosby was frequently asked to sing “White Christmas”. “So many young people were away,” he said later “and they’d hear this song…and it would really affect them. I sang it many times in Europe in the field for the soldiers. They’d holler for it; they’d demand and I’d sing it and they’d all cry. It was really sad.”

Perhaps the young members of the Greatest Generation whistled “Praise the Lord” while they were standing in recruitment lines, enduring boot camp or even on the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific. They would have sung it from a place of confidence and determination that if they remained at their position, “they would all stay free” as the song went.

But “White Christmas” put them in an entirely different state of mind. Perhaps these young warriors wept when they heard the song about December 25^th, a day that during their childhood had seemed full of magic and miracles.

And while those memories brought tears to their eyes when they were so far from home, many for the first time, it might have also provided them with a more profound reason to stay in the fight. Staying free was the goal expressed in the Frank Loesser song. Irving Berlin articulated the point of that goal in his song: defeating fascism meant living in a world that had room for the quiet beauty of Christmas.

“Praise the Lord” was too specifically tied to a particular event to be embraced by anyone who hadn’t lived through the terror of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

But the Christmas song born during that war still has the power to fill us with an intense nostalgia for an idealized past as well as hope for the future: that we might live in a world of peace where each day has the potential of being merry and bright, where all our Christmases, if not white with snow, might overflow with warmth, love, and light.

References:

Bush Jones, John. The Songs that Fought the War: Popular Music and the Home Front, 1939-1945. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2006.

Rosen, Jody. White Christmas: The Story of an American Song. New York: Scribner, 2002.

Smith, Kathleen E.R. God Bless America: Tin Pan Alley Goes to War. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2003.

LIFE, November 2, 1942.

Book Review: Singing Cowboys and Musical Moutaineers by Bill C. Malone

 

When it comes to tracing the roots of American music, there's just no place like the South: jazz, rhythm & blues, rock & roll, gospel--most music that comes with a "made in America" stamp originated south of the Mason-Dixon line. While the world obviously owes a huge musical debt to African-Americans for their contributions in the aforementioned genres, what we now call "Country" music primarily evolved from the souls and throats of white rural southerners. It is these singers - and their songs - that are the focus of Bill C. Malone's "Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers."

Malone's first concern is to precisely define white rural southern music, especially that which was sung in the 19th century South (just before this music was discovered by the rest of the world). Was it - as early 20th century British musicologist Cecil Sharpe wanted to believe - merely a twangy re-definition of ancient British ballads? Sharpe collected hundreds of Appalachian songs that were clearly traceable to the British Isles, but as Malone points out in "Singing Cowboys," Sharpe was in the South specifically looking for this connection. He found it in spades but because the other songs he surely heard echoing through the mountains didn't concern his thesis, he simply ignored them.

There was a lot to ignore. Country music has many primary sources, and although Malone claims that a detailed history of the genre is nigh impossible, he does a masterful job of describing most of its influences in fascinating detail. British ballads, black spirituals, minstrel show songs (most of their composers ironically Northern), German bands and hymns all had a major role in shaping the white folk music of 19th century America. Rural southerners were very catholic in their love for music: a good tune was a good tune, whether it originated in ancient Britain or at the desk of a contemporary New York composer.

By far the most fascinating aspect of Malone's book is hinted at in its title and answers this question: why did Country singers such as Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Alan Jackson -- who all hailed from the southeast - dress as though they had been raised on a Texas ranch? Simple: a national hunger for symbols. Before the cowboy singer took over as Country music's mascot in the 1930's, it was the mountain man of the 1920's, romanticized by novels and the "Great War" hero, Alvin "Tennessee Mountain Boy" York, that exemplified an earlier, rural, unfettered Anglo-Saxon America for a urban North, heavy with European immigrants. It was primarily the Carter family and Bradley Kincaid whose performances first personified the free-spirited, pure mountain personality and their success paved the way for many other southern musicians of the era to cash in on the hunger for the quintessential American symbol.

However, when reports of aberrant mountain behavior and oppression from coal companies began to trickle out of the Appalachians along with the proliferation of vaudeville acts that degenerated the mountain man's vigorous image into a caricature worthy of ridicule (think "The Beverly Hillbillies"), the cowboy - whose manly persona and limitless freedom was being popularized in countless films and dime novels -- took over as the pre-eminent and permanent symbol of Country music. The actual canon of authentic cowboy songs is much smaller than the amount of folk songs from the eastern south, but an image is an image and the singing cowboy is here to stay.

"Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers" is a very enlightening read regarding the roots of Country music and provides the definitive explanation and history of the connection between Country music [southern folk music] and cowboy hats.

"Yankee Doodle" and "Chester": Two songs of the American Revolution. My remarks for Oak Park's 2026 Memorial Day commemoration

In the years preceding the Revolutionary War, American leaders sought to sway their fellow colonists to the cause, making their case for a break with England via speeches or proclamations printed on single sheets of paper called Broadsides which were sold in the streets for a penny or two.

But these leaders soon realized that setting their ideas to meter and melody might be a far more effective way to influence hearts and minds. They knew that the colonists were singers. They weren’t all necessarily good singers, but group singing had been indelibly stamped into the DNA of these people whose ancestors had come to the New World for the freedom to worship God in their own way.

So, revolutionary ideas were transformed into verse and reproduced on broadsides. The lyrics cranked out in this way were not, for the most part, accompanied by printed melodies. Instead, at the top of each broadside was the title of a tune. Most of these were of British origin and as such were immediately recognizable by the colonists, which was the point: the lyrics were meant to be sung. However, the ironic result of this revolutionary singing was that Mother England was being fought with her own melodies. The lyrics to “Free America” were set to the tune of “The British Grenadiers”; “God Save the King” became “God Save these Thirteen States” and “The Liberty Song” was sung to a British Navy tune called “Heart of Oak.”

However, two major songs that came out of this conflict had a much longer shelf life than the English American amalgams noted above and became as American as apple pie, Jazz and Country.

The original first verses of "Yankee Doodle" (out of 18 total) describe colonial rustics involved in the French and Indian War of 1754-1763 in which the British and Americans fought on the same side. The first of these fictious colonists, Brother Ephraim, is introduced in the first verse and described in less than glowing terms:

Brother Ephraim sold his cow

And bought him a commission,

And then he went to Canada

To fight for the nation

But when Ephraim he came home

He proved an arrant Coward

He wouldn’t fight the Frenchmen there

For fear of being devoured.

A few verses later, a colonist named Aminadab is described as a blockhead who fought up north but didn’t understand what was going on enough to tell anyone back home about it.

When the Revolutionary War began, members of the British army stationed in the colonies became obsessed with the song, likely relishing its portrayal of cowardly dunderheaded Americans. They substituted it for the Rogue’s March while drumming maladroits out of camp and played it loudly and disruptively outside of churches on Sunday mornings.

But after Bunker Hill, when the roughhewn colonists proved their mettle in battle, they published it themselves on numerous Broadsides, quietly omitting the verses mentioning Ephraim the coward and Aminadab the dunce. And like any good folk song, the tune was altered and more verses added, obviously the ones that referenced George Washington.

Legend has it that "Yankee Doodle" was performed during the British surrender at Yorktown by special order of the young French Marquis de Lafayette, personal friend of George Washington and loyal ally of the rebels. If true, this would have been the mother of all humiliations, stinging the proud British who couldn’t even bring themselves to look at the Americans during the surrender.

The second song to make its mark during the American Revolution was composed by Bostonian tanner, singing instructor, and untrained composer named William Billings.

As singing schools popped up all over New England to teach congregants to sing from their Psalter hymnbooks with a modicum of musicality, so did the folk art of psalmody, that is, formatting the Psalms into singable meter and rhyme. None of these homegrown materials were considered serious art by upper-class American colonists who fancied themselves arbiters of good taste. No American tune, in their estimation, could possibly approximate the musical excellence of European compositions.

That opinion was about to be challenged. When William Billings published his first collection of songs in 1770, titled The New England Psalm Singer, he boldly identified himself as a native Bostonian right on the cover. And that was just the beginning: in the book’s introduction he challenged the idea that only training in Europe or England could qualify a composer. Natural talent, he claimed, was far more important. He had none of the former but copious amounts of the latter.

The frontispiece of Billings’s New England Psalm Singer featured seven men sitting around a table, their mouths open in song, their psalm books before them with Billings’s lyrics—and his tune—providing the image’s frame. Although most of the songs in The New England Psalm Singer are, of course, psalms, the men in the picture are clearly not singing in church; they are in a home, perhaps, or a meeting house. The image, which meant to covey that New Englanders sang together outside of church, was created by Paul Revere, silversmith, engraver, and Billings’s friend and fellow Bostonian.

Unlike Revere, Billings was not one of the Sons of Liberty, but a one-verse song included in his collection, titled, for no apparent reason, “Chester,” perfectly distilled, in four simple lines, the perspective of the Revolutionary leaders:

Let tyrants shake their iron rod

And slavery clank her galling chain

We fear them not, we trust in God

New England’s God forever reigns.

Foreign-trained American musicians scoffed at The New England Psalm Singer just as the professional, red-coated soldiers pouring into Boston to quell the rebellion laughed at the idea of the American Yankee Doodles defeating England in battle.

But by the time Billings had published his second collection of songs in 1778, the war was three years old with no end in sight. While it was largely being conducted without actual combat, the British could not defeat the Americans. Billings celebrated this fact in his new collection with an updated version of “Chester,” which contained four additional verses. 

“Chester” was sung everywhere: public meetings, private homes, and in military camps. With its somewhat airbrushed military details, its unequivocal claim that the colonists were in the right, and its stately church tune—reminding the singers of their belief that God was on their side—“Chester,” labeled by some as the Marseillaise of the Revolution, may very well have helped win the war for the Americans. 

For decades post-war, "Yankee Doodle" and "Chester" remained imprinted on the collective soul of the new nation.  “Yankee Doodle” was sung with a sense of joyous hilarity at the thought that a group of untrained rustics had defeated the era’s superpower. In the heady rush of post-war victory, the song was often specifically requested via cat call in musical programs that hadn’t had the foresight to include it.

"Chester" was sung too, but in a more serious way: it enunciated the American’s conviction that someone greater than the world’s superpower had stood with them, these Yankee Doodles, fought with them, and guaranteed the outcome of a war that no one thought they could win.

Local Press

 

From The Chicago Tribune, Feb. 16, 2018, print version,

"Performing History: Making a Future with the Past"

Yes, we've occasionally been featured in the local news. I was going to dedicate an entire page of our new website to these brief brushes with fame, but seeing that there were only four articles, two of which cannot be read unless you subscribe to The Chicago Tribune, I thought I would gather the links together here in this humble post. 

Wednesday Journal 2012

Chicago Tribune 2018

Forest Park Review 2019

Chicago Tribune 2022

Book Review: Anthems We Love by Steve Baltin

“All songs are easy and hard to make, but once they are released they become part of whoever hears them or whoever loves them.”

--Tom Waits, from Anthems We Love

Like others before me, I questioned the choice of the word “anthem” in the title of Steve Baltin’s new book; it simply doesn't fit the topic. But that is by far and away the only quibble I have with this engrossing work filled with “you were there” moments in pop music history. As someone who is fascinated by the creative process, I hoped to discover some details along those lines, but Anthems We Love is hardly a blueprint for aspiring songwriters. Neil Diamond simply tells Balin that “Sweet Caroline” was given to him “personally by God.” Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger claims the idea for “Light my Fire” came when Jim Morrison told him to write something “universal” and the three most universal substances Krieger could think of were air, water, and fire. He merely tells Baldwin which substance he chose, then moves on to the song's debut. 

Carly Simon gives a bit more detail as she describes the scenario that produced her hit, “Anticipation." While anxiously waiting for a delayed Cat Stevens to show up to her apartment for a dinner date, she took out her guitar:

Sometimes I just play the guitar loud if I’m nervous. Some people hit pillows, I play the guitar, exaggerate the emphasis of my playing the strings. So I was doing that and going, ‘Anticipation,’ because I was waiting for him to show up. I was anticipating his arrival. So I just started the song and I wrote the whole song, words and music, before he got there that night. So in about fifteen minutes I wrote the whole song…”

Grace Slick took a bit longer to create her “anthem”—an entire 30 minutes—and provides more compositional detail than perhaps any of Balin's interviewees; apparently, she wrote “White Rabbit” on a $50.00 beat-up upright piano with enough working keys to play some basic chords:

I know how to play a C major, C minor, D major, D minor, all that. Those are block chords. So in order to write a song all you need to know is block chords. And a melody. You sing the melody, you play the block chords with your left hand, right hand. And you can write a song that way. “White Rabbit” was written that way.

Where the book really shines, in my opinion, is the way it fulfills the promise of its subtitle. Artist after artist relates how their songs—whether given to them intact by God or plunked out on a broken upright—grew so much bigger than their moments of creation to profoundly affect the lives of millions. Marilyn McCoo describes how grown-older audience members still storm the Fifth Dimension stage whenever the group performs “Aquarius”; strangers named Sara (without an H, of course) continually approach Daryl Hall to say they were named out of love for “Sara Smile”; and Janis Ian was shocked one day to meet a couple of good-looking “golden” people backstage who told her they were powerfully affected by “At Seventeen.” “I had never understood,” she tells Batlin, “the most popular kids were also terrified and worried about losing their popularity.”

Anthems We Love is clearly a labor of love and will be thoroughly enjoyed by anyone who has ever fallen in love with--or to--a song.

Let the River Run

 

When six-year-old Sally Taylor requested her mother, Carly Simon, to teach her the family business, Simon declined. “Sal,” she said, “If you’re meant to write songs, you’ll just know how to do it.” (1)

The little girl was “really frustrated” by this reply but recovered enough to become a successful songwriter in her own right (not a surprise as her DNA must be loaded with a talent for musical composition). While I have little of Sally’s specific ambition, I did feel some of her frustration during my search for background info on Simon’s Oscar- Grammy- and Golden Globe-winning song, “Let the River Run.”  

Simon’s memoir, Boys in the Trees, was no help as it ends long before 1989, the year of Simon’s big wins. Her subsequent memoir, Touched by the Sun: My Friendship with Jackie, seemed more promising, at least its timeframe. Like her previous memoir, Touched details Simon’s emotional issues and friendships with Hollywood elite while giving us a few brief glimpses of Jackie. 

The glimpse at her songwriting is far briefer: 

“It was two years into my marriage that ‘Let the River Run,’ which I’d written for Mike’s film Working Girl, won a Grammy and a Golden Globe, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song in a Motion Picture.” (2) 

The only details in the memoir related to "Let the River Run" are tangentially related to the song: the debilitating stage fright Simon experienced leading up to the Academy Awards. That's about it. She doesn’t discuss how the song came to her, the images, the lines, the melody, nothing. Also not mentioned is the plot of Working Girl: New Yorker Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith), who has obtained a night-school business degree while supporting herself with clerical work, longs to rise out of the masses of support staff to be her own person, generate her own ideas, make her own business deals. Her boss, Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), encourages McGill to consider the two of them business partners, even though one is a broker and the other a secretary. But when Parker steals McGill's idea, she fights back, and the result is a thoroughly inspiring plot. 

With a song to match. So, what is the story behind the song's composition? Wikipedia led me to this nugget on Simon’s website:

“Carly has stated that she found inspiration for the lyrics by first reading the original script, and then by the poems of Walt Whitman. Musically, she wanted to write a hymn to New York with a contemporary jungle beat under it, so as to juxtapose those opposites in a compelling way.” (3) 

Walt Whitman. Yes, now that you mention it, his influence is clear. Let’s see if we can do some literary detective work, beginning with this line from the song: 

“Let all the dreamers wake the nation.”

Whitman was certainly a dreamer. He wrote “Leaves of Grass,” the 1860 edition, with the hope that a poet could literally save the nation from going to war by reminding its citizens of their connection to one another despite their differences: 

One from Massachusetts shall be comrade to a Missourian,

One from Main or Vermont, and a Carolinian and an Oregonese, shall be friends triune, more precious to each other than all the riches of the earth…

I will make the continent indissoluble,

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,

I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other’s necks. (4) 

Obviously, this dreamer-poet did not “wake the nation” because the Civil War started the following year, but he certainly gets an “A” for idealistic effort. Whitman was also famously a chanteuse of ordinary people and their ordinary work, most clearly seen in his poem, "I Hear America Singing":

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be, blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plant or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckman singing on the steamboat deck,

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,

The wood-cutters song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown.

The delicious singing of hte mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else. 

The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs. 

Simon’s “strong melodious song” doesn’t mention specifics such as typewriters or telephones or business deals, as Whitman might have, had he written about 1980s Manhattan, but Simon gets to the essence of the matter: the human heart is “aching” and the soul “trembling, shaking” with desire to fulfill one’s destiny, do the work one was born to do. 

Her second verse, loaded with imagery, simply rolls off the tongue: 

“Silver cities rise; the morning lights the streets that lead them; And sirens call them on with a song.”

A bit of Homeric adventure in this second line, combined, perhaps, with the sense that workers, together, make a city “silver,” something beautiful; they are the ones who enable a city to “rise,” giving it the life and greatness it wouldn’t have without their efforts. Simon, like Whitman, ennobles these laborers, providing them with dignity, beseeching them to comprehend the power in their sheer numbers. And perhaps, a few of them, like Odysseus, yearn to hear the call of the siren. Tess McGill, in "Working Girl," has definitely heard their song, via her steely ambition, to rise out of the clerical pool and into the world of business dealing. 

The following is one of my favorite Simon lines: 

“We’re coming to the edge, running on the water, coming through the fog…”

This was surely inspired by the ferry ride McGill takes every day from blue-collar Staten Island to the Manhattan business district. (This assumption is more than obvious as the song’s official video was shot on the Staten Island ferry). And yet, the line has more: Only one man is supposed to have walked on water; this is a group and they're running. In the next line “the great and small” are not only defying physics on earth but their collective power has catapulted them into the solar system. Very Whitmanesque and quite fitting for an inspirational song.

Simon's last line, "Come, the New Jerusalem," brings to mind an entirely different poet. There's nothing on the singer/songwriter's website that hints of a connection to William Blake, but take a look at the first stanza of his poem-turned-anthem, “Jerusalem”:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

Don’t get bogged down with the odd, ancient claim that Jesus Christ visited England at some point during his brief life. But do notice how England is described physically: “mountains green” and “pleasant pastures.” Then contrast the description with Blake's second verse:

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Blake is asking, “Did God countenance the transformation of green England to an England filled with unhealthy mills cranking out products to the detriment and destruction of English workers? (Read Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South if you want a literary look at just how detrimental and destructive those mills were). Is it possible that Carly Simon was familiar with Blake's poem and likened his so-described “Satanic mills” to the offices where support workers--those who are not intended for and who are unhappy with support work--sat glued to their desks typing and answering the phone all day, every day? There was little opportunity for Blake’s mill workers to rise out of their drudgery; it was either slave or starve. But the desire to rise, to be one's own person in the cutthroat world of Manhattan business, that’s what Tess McGill strives for in the film. Unlike the 19^th century mill workers, her health isn't being endangered by secretarial work. But her sense of self-worth is. She knows she can do what Katharine Parker is doing and do it just as well. And she does. (Oops—didn’t mean to spoil the ending, but being an inspirational film, you probably already guessed where this was going, and if not, well, you’ve had 35 years to take a look 😊).

Although Simon needed medication to endure the Academy Awards, she writes in Touched that her big win banished depression from her life for a significant amount of time, even after her chronically unsupportive mother, Andrea Simon, called her at the LA hotel saying, “I’m so proud of you! Look at all those people who deserved it more, but you got it!” (5) 

I disagree. (And “all those people,” Andrea? There were only three songs nominated, you bumbling excuse for a parent!). The other songs—“Calling You” and “Two Hearts”—are quite forgettable. “Let the River Run" is not. Maybe it’s because it so clearly calls to the dreamer in each of us. Maybe because we’re all like Whitman’s muses, ordinary people doing ordinary things, hoping against hope that we can rise—not above others to push them down, but above our own limitations to become the best version of ourselves, so we can do whatever it is we were born to do. 

Let The River Run - Carly Simon (youtube.com)

(1) CNN.com - Entertainment - Star of Tomorrow: Sally Taylor - November 1, 2000

(2) Touched by the Sun, page 105. 

(3) http://www.carlysimon.com/askcarly/faq.shtml

(4) “Calamus” 6, 13, 16, from Leaves of Grass 1860.

(5) Touched by the Sun, page 111. 

Book Review: Danny Boy: The Legend of the Beloved Irish Ballad

 

My first and only opportunity to perform "Danny Boy" occurred in the basement of a Catholic church when a seniors' group hired us to sing our "Greatest Hits of the 20th Century" program. Because the performance fell on St. Patrick's Day, they requested we add a few Irish songs to our repertoire. At the exact moment I sang the line, "And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me," a thunderous stampede was heard overhead: the school had just released its students for the day. 

Which has (or perhaps should have) almost nothing to do with this review, although that hilarious juxtaposition of lyrics and distinctly non-musical sound prevented many eyes from misting up, which they normally would have given the powerful emotions often conjured by any performance of "Danny Boy," something Malachy McCourt, in his lovely little book, mentions repeatedly.

Who wrote the lyrics? Where did the Londonderry Air originate? Alright, it came from Londonderry but from whose pen--or possibly, in this case, from whose pipes or whose fiddle? Who is speaking/singing and what is her/his relationship to "Danny"?

No spoilers here, and McCourt doesn't necessarily provide a concrete answer to all these questions, but he does lay out enough information, both legendary and factual, to make this an enlightening read for lovers of the song. McCourt's writing is sometimes humorous, often beautiful, and always informative as can be seen from a summarizing paragraph towards the book's end:

"While 'Danny Boy' will always be touted as an Irish ballad, it was truly the product of many different worlds meshing together. Let it be the tune of a blind, Irish fiddler drifting across the sea, reaching an English barrister who would finally marry words and melody to create a song capable of describing, at least in part, the contents of the human heart. The song depicts the human condition, about the unknown and the black cloud of finality that accompanies it. The message is available to all those who want to hear it. 'Danny Boy' has a profound effect on people from all corners of the world, a trait it shares with the truest of any work of art."