|
“Over There”
Evariste writes:
Your headline, “What’s happening Over There,” is probably an allusion to the attached song, recorded in 1917 by the American Quartet with Billy Murray. The recording is so old that it’s now in the public domain. I’ve put the file at my server, so you can either open and play it online or save it to your computer. It brings me great joy to listen to this and other vintage American recordings.
The friend who gave it to me made the mp3 by digitizing line-in recordings from some archaic medium (records or maybe some even older format? I’m not sure, I’ll have to ask him). Prior to my putting this at my site, his specific digitizations have not been online anywhere. He just made them for his personal use and gave me a couple of dozen choice vintage recordings to introduce me to American music of that era.
LA replies:
It’s a charming and beautiful song. I don’t remember hearing this original version before. Listening to it, we know that Francis Schaeffer was right when he said that European and American culture passed the threshold of despair sometime in the early to mid 20th century. This song is definitely pre-despair. It has a sweetness, innocence, confidence, and happiness that is inconceivable in the culture of the last several decades and marks it of another era. This is the way America used to be.
Here is Wikipedia’s article on the song. It was written in 1917 by George M. Cohan and was popular in both World War I and World War II.
I thought from his name, which is like a theatrical version of Cohen, that he was Jewish, but he was Irish Catholic. This is from the start of the Wikipedia article on Cohan:
George Michael Cohan (July 3, 1878—November 5, 1942) was a United States entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer, director, and producer of Irish descent. Known as “the man who owned Broadway” in the decade before World War I, he is considered the father of American musical comedy.
Cohan was born in Providence, Rhode Island to Irish Catholic parents. A baptismal certificate (which gave the wrong first name for his mother) indicated that he was born on July 3, but the Cohan family always insisted that George had been “born on the Fourth of July!” George’s parents were traveling Vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage while still an infant, at first as a prop, later learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk….
By his teens, Cohan became well-known as one of the stage’s best male dancers, and he also started writing original skits and songs for the family act in both vaudeville and minstrel shows. Soon he was writing professionally, selling his first songs to a national publisher in 1893. Cohan had his first big Broadway hit in 1904 with the show Little Johnny Jones, which introduced his tunes “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “The Yankee Doodle Boy”.
Cohan became one of the leading Tin Pan Alley songwriters, publishing upwards of 1500 original songs, noted for their catchy melodies and clever lyrics. His other major hit songs included “You’re a Grand Old Flag”, “The Warmest Baby In The Bunch”, “Life’s A Funny Proposition After All”, “I Want to Hear a Yankee Doodle Tune”, “You Won’t Do Any Business If You Haven’t Got A Band”, “Mary’s a Grand Old Name”, “The Small Town Gal”, “I’m Mighty Glad I’m Living, That’s All”, “That Haunting Melody”, and the popular war song, “Over There”.
Here’s the beginning of the Wikipedia article on Billy Murray:
William Thomas “Billy” Murray (25 May 1877—17 August 1954) was one of the most popular singers in the United States in the early decades of the 20th century. While he received star billings on Vaudeville, he was best known for his prolific work in the recording studio, making records for almost every record label of the era. He was probably the best selling recording artist of the first quarter of the 20th century.
He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of immigrants from Ireland. He became fascinated with the theater and joined a traveling vaudeville troupe in 1893. He also performed in minstrel shows early in his career. He made his first recordings for a local phonograph cylinder company in San Francisco, California in 1897. He started recording regularly in the New York City and New Jersey area in 1903, when the nation’s major record companies as well as the Tin Pan Alley music industry were concentrated there.
In 1906 he waxed the first of his popular duets with Ada Jones. He also performed with Aileen Stanley, the Haydn Quartet, and the American Quartet (also known as the Premier Quartet), in addition to his solo work.
He had a strong tenor voice with excellent enunciation and a more conversational delivery than common with bel canto singers of the era. On comic songs he often deliberately sang slightly flat, which he felt helped the comic effect.
The more I listen to the song, the better it gets. Murray’s delivery is so expressive. When the chorus comes in it has the beauty of opera or light opera. The climactic moment, when the chorus sings, “Cause the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,” is deeply moving and you can feel the impact this song must have had on the people of the time.
By the way, it’s a good thing Cohan wasn’t Jewish. The paleocons would say this proves that American involvement in the war was a neocon plot.
You know, I’ve heard the name George M. Cohan all my life, in old movies and so on, but it was always just a name to me.
- end of initial entry -
Dale F. writes:
If you’re interested in this sort of music, UC Santa Barbara’s Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project has a great website with access to thousands of songs. A search for “billy murray” (without the quotes—the search engine doesn’t like them) yielded 310 hits:
Tim W. writes:
Get the two DVD set of the 1942 film Yankee Doodle Dandy starring James Cagney. It’s a biopic on George M. Cohan and it’s excellent. It’s directed by Michael Curtiz, who directed Casablanca that same year.
Like many biopics, the film isn’t 100% accurate and has a few scenes that are for entertainment purposes only, but it’s one of the most stirringly patriotic movies I’ve ever seen. There are lots of bonus features on the second DVD, and the commentary track by Rudy Behlmer, one of the premier historians of Hollywood’s golden age, is outstanding. Behlmer points out the places in the film where the storyline is fictitious and where it is accurate.
LA replies:
Amazingly, I’ve never seen it, despite liking James Cagney and despite being a customer for years at probably the best movie rental store for Hollywood Golden Age movies that existed anywhere in America, until it tragically closed a year or two ago when rents went up.
Evariste writes:
You write:
The more I listen to the song, the better it gets. Murray’s delivery is so expressive. When the chorus comes in it has the beauty of opera or light opera. The climactic moment, when the chorus sings, “Cause the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,” is deeply moving and you can feel the impact this song must have had on the people of the time.
I vehemently agree with this. I never get tired of the freshness, assertiveness, innocence, confidence, youth, and beauty of this song. It gives me such chills. The most emotionally powerful moments for me are when he sings the following specific lyrics:
“Hear them calling you and me/Every son of Liberty”
“Make your daddy glad/To have had such a lad/Tell your sweetheart, love so fine/To be proud her boy’s in line!”
“Johnny get your gun, get your gun, get your gun/Johnny, show the Hun: you’re a son of a gun”
“Make your mother proud of you/And the old red, white, and blue!”
I guess because I’m feeling personally rallied, and imagining poignantly that I could have come from such parents and could have been torn from such a sweetheart to do my duty and get in line to go to the trenches. It really must have been something to be alive in those American times, as brutal and senseless as WWI was. I wish I had a time machine, but in lieu of that, these recordings will do.
Emily B. writes:
I find it ironic what you said about this song: sweetness, innocence, confidence, and happiness that is inconceivable in the culture of the last several decades and marks it of another era. That description fits my brother to a tee; he just introduced me to this song very recently and told me it was his favorite! My brother is very unusual, yet very popular; people can’t help but like him when they meet him. He is 29 years old, very religious, a virgin, and is currently saving up money to buy his sweetheart an engagement ring. She is a couple years older, was “teacher of the year” at her Catholic school and never dated before, either, before meeting my brother. Both are good looking and extremely well adjusted in contrast to the stereotype of older virgins (and my dad was one when he married my mom at age 34; my dad introduced the song to my brother.)
I’m ashamed to say that I responded that the song was only “okay” when he asked how I liked it. I had just shared with him, though of course he was very familiar with it, one of my favorite 20th century songs, “The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” sung by the Andrews Sisters.
LA replies:
Emily’s comments about her brother are relevant to a discussion going on in another entry, about abortion and the belief in sexual freedom.
Evariste writes:
Wow—that’s a real treasure. Bookmarked for long-term perusal and enjoyment.
I want to send you more of these wonderful songs; they’re like vignettes from a paradisical America in the Garden of Eden, before the Fall. Right this minute, I’m torn over whether I should stop with the wartime songs and go civilian. I think maybe I can send you just one more wartime song without being tiresome? I’m sure you know this song as well: It’s a long long way to Tipperary, 1914…and it’s another rousing and powerful performance by Billy Murray.
LA replies
I never was particularly crazy about “Tipperary,” too “corny” for my taste, and the melody doesn’t do much for me, but I’d like to hear Murray’s performance.
By the way, in the multi-part 1978 TV movie about Edward and Mrs. Simpson, which we discussed recently, there’s a scene where King Edward is visiting a Navy ship, having dinner with the men, and as they’re socializing, he walks among them and starts singing “Tipperary,” and they all join in, and it’s very moving. This was a gift Edward had, of being both a royal, and a man of the people. But, as we discussed, he also had severe defects and overall it was best that he abdicated.
Adela G. writes:
My thanks to Evariste for the wonderful recording of Cohan’s “Over There.” I’m delighted to learn of his fondness for vintage recordings.
You can also hear the versions recorded by Arthur Fields and Enrico Caruso at the Internet Archive, as well as Billy Murray’s rendition of “Grand Old Rag”:
And for a more recent (WWII) patriotic take on Yankee Doodle, there’s this rousing (and un-PC) number with William Frawley as the Yankee Doodler.
(Frawley representing academia is certainly preferable to, say, Nancy Hopkins or Ward Churchill doing so. Ah, well, just another reminder never to mistake motion for progress.)
LA writes:
A reader sends a YouTube of the last scene of Yankee Doodle Dandy in which James Cagney as the older George M. Cohan sees soldiers marching by singing “Over there.”
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 28, 2008 02:14 AM | Send
|