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:
The fall of France, the German hammerlock on the Continent, and the British retreat from Dunkirk had the admittedly minor silver lining of chastening songwriters into focusing for the duration on the human element - and all its uncertainties, particularly if you're on the other side of the world waiting for Mail Call:
I just got word
From a guy who heard
From a guy next door to me
The girl he met
Just loves to pet
And it fits you to a tee...
That's from a Glenn Miller CD I bought twenty years ago, on another anniversary and after the dedication of the new World War Two memorial in Washington. I'd pulled off the interstate late one night and dashed into a Borders (remember those?) to grab a new geopolitical tome I needed in a hurry. Smack dab the other side of the front door was a big display for a new best-of-Glenn-Miller compilation, and for some reason I found myself strangely drawn to it. I had a long drive ahead of me and it seemed just the thing. Back on the highway and heading into the hills, I shoved it in the CD player and up came his theme tune, "Moonlight Serenade." I was driving through the mountains on a beautiful blue moonlit night, which ought to fit the tune perfectly. But it doesn't. That warm, sweet sound is linked to wartime forever, even for those of us who weren't there and know it only as the incidental music to films and TV drama. The serious jazz guys are sniffy about the Miller sound. That clarinet lead with the tenor saxes playing along an octave lower can sound awful cloying in large doses, but, if the mood's right, it's gorgeously romantic. Nothing to do with the war at all, in any literal sense, yet it's the sound of that moment now and forever. It's the music oozing across a crowded floor in the dying moments at a palais de danse in southern England, and you're pressed together till the final bar because tomorrow you're shipping out...
What else can you play? Forty-five years ago, John Schlesinger made a wartime romance called Yanks, starring young Richard Gere as the proverbial GI in England, over-sexed, overpaid and over here. Richard Rodney Bennett composed a truly fine score, but the lasting musical memory of the picture is a period piece - "I'll Be Seeing You", one of those emblems of the era that, like "As Time Goes By", actually pre-dates the war. Both were buried in Broadway flops of the Thirties and languished unknown until the times caught up with the sentiments. "I'll Be Seeing You" is more than just a pop hit or a romantic ballad; it's the distillation of an entire cultural sensibility, as Schlesinger understood. Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal produced a kind of talisman for parted lovers, with a beguiling Fain tune and a Kahal lyric that catalogues "all the old familiar places" where the memory lingers...
In that small cafe
The park across the way
The children's carousel
The chestnut tree, the wishing well...
Schlesinger had it sung on the soundtrack by Anne Shelton, Britain's other "Forces' Sweetheart" - after Vera Lynn. I once asked Sammy Fain which was his favorite recording, and he reeled off about forty he enjoyed - country, big band, rhythm'n'blues. But, if you fell in love with it as a wartime ballad, you always hear it in the voices of the day, as the last dance under the glitterball, with some big-band canary up on the stage. A couple of years back, Nancy Franklin wrote a piece for The New Yorker insisting Jo Stafford's was the best version. Bing had the big hit with it, but the Tommy Dorsey band wasn't far behind, although it's Johnny Mince's clarinet rather than the young Sinatra's vocal that supplies the real wartime wistfulness:
Still, "I'll Be Seeing You" undeniably has a postwar life - it was the "our song" song of, among many others, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, whose faintly icky embrace thereof only confirms its admission to the elite pantheon of über-standards - that select group ("It Had To Be You", "The Way You Look Tonight" and a few more) we'll still be singing when 90 per cent of the rest have fallen away.
So on this D-Day anniversary let us celebrate a song that will always be a war song: "We'll Meet Again". To be sure, non-wartime warblers have sung it. A few years ago, I heard Johnny Cash on NPR discussing his version of the tune, and telling his interviewer that it was a Rodgers & Hammerstein song. Needless to say, Mr Cash's error went unremarked. Hard to think of anything that sounds less like Rodgers melodically or lyrically less like Hammerstein at even his most sentimental:
We'll Meet Again
Don't know where, don't know when
But I know We'll Meet Again
Some sunny day...
It's a British song, by Hughie Charles and Ross Parker, the team that gave the country its other great war anthem (and our Song of the Week #53), "There'll Always Be An England". In 1938, Charles and Parker had written their first hit song, "I Won't Tell A Soul (That I Love You)", recorded by a handful of the top British dance bands - Roy Fox, Victor Sylvester, Lew Stone. A year later, like most Denmark Street songwriters, they were trying to figure out a musical angle on the ever more imminent war. In an attempt at a local version of "God Bless America", they wrote "There'll Always Be an England". And then they decided to address the impending global apocalypse rather more obliquely:
Keep smiling through
Just like you always do
Till the blue skies
Drive the dark clouds far away...
Its slightly stodgy optimism is quintessentially British. In that summer of '39, they passed it to the bandleader Ambrose, who'd taken on a young singer called Vera Lynn. She'd sung with the Charlie Kunz orchestra and had made a solo record of a leaden novelty called "Up The Wooden Hill To Bedfordshire". But Hughie Charles considered Vera "a very nice kid" and thought "We'll Meet Again" would be right for her. So Ambrose worked up an arrangement and, as Dame Vera told me a few years back, audiences responded to it immediately, and it quickly became her sign-off song - especially when she landed her own BBC radio show a few months into the war:
"We'll Meet Again" made Vera Lynn a star. She's certainly known in America - in the Fifties, before the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or anybody else, "Auf Wiedersehen, Sweetheart" made her the first British pop star ever to have a Number One hit on the Billboard charts. But the scale of her wartime celebrity in Britain and much of the Commonwealth is of an entirely different order. She was born in East Ham, and began singing at the age of seven in the local working men's club. In Mark Steyn's Passing Parade, I recall a rather depressing lunch presided over by Princess Margaret, at which I sat next to Dame Vera and her husband (and former clarinetist) Harry. But I was rather touched to find that, despite her advance from Forces' Sweetheart to national icon, she still had a pronounced Cockney in her speaking voice.
Not when she sang, though. It's not a creamy voice, like GI Jo Stafford's. There's something rawer in there, and in those early records a very real emotional clutch. The sound of the Empire at war is Vera Lynn singing "We'll Meet Again" - and, despite the notorious British antipathy to audience participation, she never had to cajole the Tommies or anybody else into joining in:
So will you please say hello
To the folks that I know?
Tell them I won't be long
They'll be happy to know
That as you saw me go
I was singing this songWe'll Meet Again...
That's right, it's one of those songs in which you sing about the song you're singing even as you sing it. That middle section is the trick of the whole thing: It has an affable ease; it's a textbook definition of what Betty Comden used to call "the singable song", not merely a number you want to hear some guy do on the jukebox but one you can't help singing yourself. Even today, if the plane's delayed and the Costa-bound Brits are slumped at the gate waiting in vain for an explanation as to what's going on, the urge to sing "We'll Meet Again" seems to rise spontaneously in their collective gullets and brush past the incoming sixteen pints of lager to burst forth. If you treat the number as an anthemic Brit singalong, you can't go wrong. If you make the mistake of treating it as a real ballad - as an "I'll Be Seeing You" or "As Time Goes By" - you'll come a cropper. In the early Sixties, Frank Sinatra came to London to make what would be his only album ever to be recorded outside the United States, Great Songs from Great Britain. And the minute they got wind of that title every songwriter from Noël Coward down was trying to push his best material on Frank. Instead, for reasons best known to Sinatra and his arranger Robert Farnon, the final selection included "We'll Meet Again", whose stiff-upper-lipped sexlessness Frank can't get his head around at all - as you heard on yesterday's On the Town:
But who needs Sinatra? In my BBC days, I chanced at one point to see a memo on the corporation's plans for a post-nuclear Britain. In the event of the country getting nuked by the Soviets, some two-dozen underground bunkers around the British Isles would provide public service announcements and general morale boosting, as part of which there would be extensive broadcasts of Dame Vera singing "We'll Meet Again", notwithstanding that the odds of doing so were considerably longer. Maybe, in the event of an Iranian strike, the same old plans will be dusted off and put into action. I wonder if Peter Sellers, who suggested the use of "We'll Meet Again" to Stanley Kubrick for the finale of Dr Strangelove, had also seen the BBC nuclear melodies line-up.
Its official status was very belatedly confirmed by Her late Majesty in an address to the Commonwealth from within her regal Covid quarantine. The Queen did not often quote pop lyrics, except when shooting the breeze re "Rock Around the Clock" with Elton John, but she did in 2020, assuring her subjects that "we will meet again". Even the CBC, which since Peter Mansbridge's retirement often gives the impression it has no memory of anything before Pierre Trudeau's later ministries, managed to get the allusion:
'We will meet again,' she pointedly said in a direct reference to the most famous British song from the war years of the 1940s, when she was a teenager.
After Strangelove, there were two "We'll Meet Agains", the real thing and a rather flatfooted and heavy handed attempt at ironic subversion, which never quite came off. One reason, I think, is that the song's resilience already has a kind of loopiness about it. Rosemary Clooney told me about playing the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium in front of the Queen a few years back. She was sitting in her dressing room, and musing on earlier Palladium appearances, with Bing Crosby and other pals no longer with us. And she must have looked a bit glum because when Shirley Bassey caught a glimpse of her in the mirror she decided to cheer Rosie up by singing "We'll Meet Again". And, by the time they got to the middle eight about saying hello to the folks that you know, Rosie threw in the towel and she and Shirl finished the song together. By the way, the subsequent Clooney recording is one of the best later versions:
The cheerless British Fifties and the imperial sunset did more to "We'll Meet Again" than Kubrick and the ironists ever could. I mentioned above that rather strained lunch I had with Princess Margaret and Dame Vera. The latter seemed a delightfully near parodic embodiment of Englishness. She sent back the avocado with the splendid dismissal "This foreign food disagrees with me." Afterwards, we had a little chat about her songs. "They still like 'We'll Meet Again'," she said (I seem to recall a couple of laddish telly pop stars had just had a Number One cover version with it). "But 'There'll Always Be An England' is what they call controversial," she added, lowering her voice, lest someone might overhear. By "controversial", she meant that the very concept of "England" was now officially discouraged. With one of her two signature songs all but banned from the airwaves, the survivor was imbued with a kind of pathos it had never had during the lowest moments of the Second World War. It came to symbolize simultaneously both Britain's wartime defiance and a resigned acceptance of remorseless decline. Dame Vera lived past her century, to see her cherished signature song pressed into service as a lockdown chin-up:
I came to hate Zoom-call singalongs very quickly four yers ago. Yet to me, it is Dame Vera's original eighty-five-year-old recording that sounds sadder with every passing year. I said about "There'll Always Be An England" that there's now a question mark at the end of the title. Likewise, with this song:
We'll Meet Again
Don't know where, don't know when
But I know We'll Meet Again
Some sunny day.
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