President Trump was a guest of President Macron this past week to mark not only Bastille Day but also the one hundredth anniversary of America's entry into the Great War. So, with that in mind, altogether now:
Par là-bas!
Par là-bas!
Qu' on le dise, sans méprise, par là-bas!
Nous emboîtons le pas!
Emboîtons le pas!
Le ram plan plan du tambour bat...
Doesn't ring a bell? Let's try it en anglais:
Over There!
Over There!
Send the word, send the word Over There!
That the Yanks are coming!
The Yanks are coming!
The drums rum-tumming ev'rywhere...
In fact, President Wilson sent the word that the Yanks are coming on April 6th 1917, and this song was written that same day. But, if President Trump can mark the centenary of America's declaration of war three months later, then we can do the same for the centenary of the biggest American hit song of that war. In pop-music terms, the Great War was the war to end all wars: It was a bonanza for Tin Pan Alley on a scale never seen before or since. The Second World War would produce ballads of love and separation - "I'll Be Seeing You", "I'll Never Smile Again", "We'll Meet Again" - but the First generated war songs about war, about soldiering in foreign climes: "Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit-Bag", "Good-Bye Broadway, Hello France", "I Don't Know Where I'm Going But I'm On My Way", "Hello Central, Give Me No Man's Land", "I'm Crazy Over Every Girl In France", " Mademoiselle From Armentières (Parlay-Voo)", "My Belgian Rose", "If He Can Fight Like He Can Love, Goodnight Germany", "Sister Susie's Sewing Shirts For Soldiers" (and my old pal Irving Caesar's extension thereof, "Brother Benny's Baking Buns For Belgians")... Most of them vanished with the Armistice, but this one was on an entirely different scale and echoes down the decades:
We'll be over!
We're coming over!
And we won't come back till it's over
Over There!
The Great War began in August 1914 - for almost everyone else, that is. Any visiting space alien alighting on North America in those first three years would have concluded that Canada was the bellicose, militaristic power of the western hemisphere - recruiting posters everywhere, soldiers shipping east on every railroad platform. South of the border, President Wilson campaigned for election in 1916 under the slogan "He Kept Us Out Of The War", and that was how a distant republic liked it. Isolationism was widespread, including in Tin Pan Alley, where the biggest American war song to date had been (as noted last week) "I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier".
But a canny songwriter can turn on a dime, or a crotchet, and no one turned more nimbly than George M Cohan, the soi-disant "man who owns Broadway": if you're in Times Square on New Year's Eve, that's his statue the revelers are thronging round. He deserves his place: At the dawn of American show business, he could do it all - actor, singer, dancer, producer, director, author, play doctor ...and composer and lyricist of such lasting hits as "Give My Regards To Broadway", "I'm A Yankee Doodle Dandy" and our Song of the Week #12, "You're A Grand Old Flag".
Woodrow Wilson had asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany at the beginning of that week - Monday April 2nd 1917. They got around to it in the wee small hours of Friday April 6th - 3am or thereabouts - and by lunchtime the President had signed it. As the competing newsboys hoisting their special editions touted from street corners, America was now a nation at war. Cohan lived in Great Neck on Long Island (where Billy Joel and Tyne Daly recently donated money to put up a plaque to him) but that day he was headed into New York. He bought a paper at the station and boarded the train. "I read those war headlines," he said, "and I got to thinking and humming - and for a minute I thought I was going to dance." Nothing like the bloodiest conflict in human history to put a spring in your step. Cohan was so moved by those headlines that as the train headed into New York he started to write:
Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun!
Take it on the run, on the run, on the run!
Hear them calling you and me
Ev'ry son of Liberty...
First, let us note that not for the first time an enduring George M Cohan song is slyly supplanting a previous hit. Cohan's "Yankee Doodle Boy" - better known as "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" - owes its origins to the earlier "Yankee Doodle" who stuck a feather in his hat and called it Macaroni. That song pre-dates the Revolution but had survived in Americans' affections all the way to the early Twentieth Century. Then Cohan shows up, writes a new number whose verse quotes, musically and lyrically, both "Dixie" and "The Star-Spangled Banner", and whose chorus climaxes with a more or less direct lift from "Yankee Doodle":
Yankee Doodle went to London just to ride a pony
I am that Yankee Doodle Boy!
And in that confident declaration he made it so. Cohan's cocksure dandy swallowed "Yankee Doodle" so comprehensively that today, in Fourth of July parades across America, the earlier song is all but entirely unsung. For the conclusion of "You're A Grand Old Flag", he attempted to do the same to "Auld Lang Syne":
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
Keep your eye on the grand old flag!
Fortunately, Robbie Burns seems to be holding his own - at least on one night a year.
But for his new war song Cohan was borrowing from an old war song, starting with the very first line of that first urgent verse:
Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun...
"Johnny, Get Your Gun" was a minstrel hit from 1886, and the war in question was the eternal battle between good and evil - and the need to give it to Satan with both barrels:
The way am rough wid briar roots
(Johnny get your gun, get your gun today)
We'll shoot ol' Satan 'fore he scoots
(Johnny get your gun, get your gun today)
When you hear de rascal yell
(Johnny get your gun, get your gun today)
Aim your musket, give him well
(Johnny get your gun, get your gun today...)
The man who wrote it was Monroe H Rosenfeld, one of the first commercial songwriters in New York's Tin Pan Alley - and, in fact, the fellow who reputedly came up with that designation for the warren of publishers' offices around West 28th Street, where an unceasing cacophony of cheap upright pianos rent the air in the manner of a lot of tin pans being banged. "Tin Pan Alley" served as a shorthand not just for the street but for the American music biz in general for most of the 20th century, decades after Rosenfeld and his entire catalogue of protean pop hits had been forgotten. "Johnny Get Your Gun" survived as the first line of "Over There" and, modified, in the title of Dalton Trumbo's anti-war novel of 1938, Johnny Got His Gun. Likewise, Monroe Rosenfeld's sentimental ballad of 1888 "With All Her Faults I Love Her Still" survives in the close of one of the very greatest of American standards, by Isham Jones and Gus Kahn:
With all your faults I love you still
It Had To Be You
Wonderful you
It Had To Be You.
If Cohan and Kahn lifting Rosenfeld's titles seems a tad unfair, well, in his day Rosenfeld was a notorious borrower of other men's tunes. At any rate, all those urgent rat-a-tat quavers at the blast off of the verse of "Over There" suggests (unlike Rosenfeld's more lethargic rendering) that Cohan's eager to open fire right from the get-go. Then comes the first chromatic chord and a shift to big fat stirring lumped-throat swelled-chest crotchets ("Hear them calling...") down the fifths ("Ev'ry son of Liberty"), and back to the urgency:
Hurry right away, no delay, go today!
Make your Daddy glad to have had such a lad!
Tell your sweetheart not to pine
To be proud her boy's in line...
And, on the way to the recruiting office, how many paused to admire Cohan's rhyme scheme? Make your Daddy glad to have had such a lad? Gad!
As important as knowing how to rhyme is knowing when not to. Among early Alleymen, still emerging from the shadow of convoluted-storyline verse-and-chorus parlor ballads, Cohan was the master of repetition:
Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun
Take it on the run, on the run, on the run...
Repetition and reinforcement makes the commonplace emphatic and singable - which is why Cohan kept it up when he got to the chorus:
Over There!
Over There!
Send the word, send the word Over There!
And what word would that be?
That the Yanks are coming
The Yanks are coming...
When the train pulled into town, the songwriter had the whole thing, or so he hoped. He hurried off to an old pal, Joe Humphreys, the ring announcer at Madison Square Garden, and treated him to a preview of his newest number - because, in Cohan's words, Mr Humphreys "never was a fellow for lying". "George, you've got a song!" declared Joe.
The somewhat duller version of this story is that he never wrote it on the train on Friday April 6th but did so at home the following day - Saturday April 7th - when he holed up in his study back in Great Neck. As Cohan occasionally told it, he "put on paper in my Great Neck home the start of one great idea, something I am more proud of than anything I have ever written." On the Sunday he went to the kitchen, selected one of those aforementioned tin pans, procured a broom from the closet, and fixed the former on his head and shouldered the latter. Then he gathered the family together and announced that he'd written a brand new song. With tin pan and broomstick, he marched around bellowing:
Over There!
Over There!
"We kids had heard, of course, that the United States was at war," recalled his daughter Mary, "and now here was Dad acting just like a soldier. So I began to sob, and I threw myself down, hanging for dear life to his legs as he marched, begging him, pleading with him not to go away to the war."
Which, given the preceding three years of carnage on the western front, is an entirely reasonable reaction. Cohan shook off his clinging moppets and finished the song. But more disturbing to him was the reaction when he performed it for the first time in front of a military audience at Fort Myers. The soldiers' response to "Over There" was "apathetic" - which one can well understand: For years they'd been told that this quarrel between various European empires - British, German, Russian, Austrian, Turkish - was nothing to do with them, and now suddenly it was. It was all very well to make your Daddy glad to have had such a lad, but, even so, the drums weren't exactly rum-tumming ev'rywhere... Any soldier with an ounce of awareness knew it had ceased to be that kind of war by the autumn of 1914.
In 1917 Cohan was not yet 40, but younger men were writing bigger songs (Irving Berlin) and better shows (Jerome Kern). Nevertheless, this was his turf, just like "Yankee Doodle" and "Grand Old Flag": a song for the nation to sing as one - and he did that better than any of these whippersnappers. It wasn't about the money (Cohan later happily assigned all his royalties for "Over There" to war charities) but about his own sense of what he felt he did better than anyone. As The Saturday Evening Post pronounced, "A nation that sings can never be beaten... Songs are to a nation's spirit what ammunition is to a nation's army" - and, musically speaking, George M Cohan was still the cocky little song'n'dance fireplug who felt that, musically speaking, no ammunition hit the national target quite as powerfully as his.
Undeterred by the muted indifference at Fort Myers, he called an old friend. Nora Bayes was a Broadway star who had introduced "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" and co-written "Shine On, Harvest Moon" (both a decade or so earlier) and was currently starring in her own revue at the 39th Street Theatre. He told her he had a song that "you might be able to help me put across". She liked what she heard. "Nora Bayes was the first one to try it out," reported Billboard on May 26th 1917, "and at her entertainment at the 39th Street Theater the other night sang it without any previous announcement. It was a riot." Cohan never again had to worry about apathy and indifference. "Over There", wrote Billboard, "promises to be one of the biggest knockouts in the sensational song writing career of George M Cohan, 'the man who made Broadway famous'."
As for Cohan needing Miss Bayes to "help put across" the number, the humorist Robert C Benchley would later remark that they wound up putting it across the eastern bank of the Rhine. By the end of 1917, it was the bestselling song of the year, and so far ahead of the pack that its publisher William Jerome was made a very unusual offer by a bigger rival, Leo Feist: He offered to buy the song outright for ten grand. Jerome said no. Feist went to 15, then 20, then 25,000. "Okay," said Jerome. "But cash." That would be half-a-million today. Feist made his money back plus an extra five grand in the first month's sales.
For a while it was primarily Nora Bayes' song. That's her on the cover of the first sheet music - in uniform certainly, yet oddly unAmerican. The reason was that Cohan and his publisher were trying to warm up America to her newfound allies, and to warm up those overseas allies to a brand new war song. So Miss Bayes appears in a ruffled British redcoat and a vaguely Gallic hat topped by a plumed French tricolor. There is something almost touchingly pointless about these efforts: For the French, the war wasn't "Over There" - Par là-bas - it was right here, and it had made a charnel ground of their country. Which was why the British weren't in the mood for Cohan's ra-ra rouser, either: Too many of them lay buried in France after three years of brutal trench warfare whose casualties touched almost every village in His Majesty's Dominions, from Canada to India to New Zealand. The British Empire's war dead in France and Flanders alone already numbered half-a-million: Their surviving comrades were long past songs about proud sweethearts and rum-tumming drumbeats. "Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit-Bag And Smile, Smile, Smile"? There wasn't a kit-bag big enough to hold the troubles they'd seen. Yet Cohan doffed his cap to the great British chin-up song of the early war in his own second verse:
Johnny, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun!
Johnny, show the Hun you're a son-of-a-gun!
Hoist the flag and let her fly!
Yankee Doodle do or die!
Pack your little kit, show your grit, do your bit...
No one did his bit or showed his grit quite like George M Cohan. The cockaded Miss Bayes soon yielded on the sheet music to William J Reilly from the USS Michigan, who happened also to be a singer. He recorded as "Sailor Reilly" and was given leave by the US Navy to go ashore and sing patriotic songs to aid the war effort. "Over There" was a favorite, but Sailor Reilly attempted to diversify and made spirited recordings of "Keep Your Head Down, Fritzie Boy" and "We're All Going Calling On The Kaiser". He put a real individual face on Cohan's exhortation to the generic "Johnny", and the soldiery responded. On the next edition of the sheet music, Norman Rockwell offered a trio of warbling doughboys gathered round a banjolele player enthusiastically bellowing the song, presumably in the direction of the Hun on the other side of No Man's Land.
By now it was the unquestioned musical embodiment of the war effort. Yet Cohan still insisted on the inclusion of that very literal French text I quoted above - "This Great World Wide Song Hit Now Has Both French And English Lyrics," boasted the publisher - and, when the most famous singer in the world, Enrico Caruso, recorded the piece, the author made a one-word concession in the English lines:
Send the word, send the word Over There
That the boys are coming
The boys are coming...
Whether that did anything for Italian sales I know not. But "boys" is a very weak substitution for "Yanks": that "k" sound is vital to the spirit and swagger of the song.
The Yanks weren't over there for very long: it was a year and a half from the declaration to the Armistice of November 11th 1918, not long enough for "Pack Up Your Troubles" to curdle into "The bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling... Oh, Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling?" as had happened to the British songs. Instead, the three-note bugle-call motif of the title phrase - "O-ver There", high D, F, B flat - became as familiar as "Taps", but for the living and victorious. Cohan's song sold two million copies of sheet music in the remaining 18 months of the war, and retained its popularity the entire time the Yanks were over there. "When the boys march down the Avenue," declared that Saturday Evening Post article, "it's the martial crash of 'Over There' that puts the victory swing in their stride."
And after the tickertape parades the biggest post-war war song was a hit about how dull the home front was going to be for returning doughboys: "How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down On The Farm After They've Seen Paree?" America's war was not the generational and civilizational catastrophe that Britain's and Europe's was.
Beyond that, Cohan's song was the first explicit distillation of how the emerging new-world superpower thought about the quarrels over there: You crazy foreigners start this stuff, and then we come in and clean up your mess. And, when you make us do that, we play for keeps:
So prepare!
Say a prayer!
Send the word, send the word to beware
We'll be over!
We're coming over!
And we won't come back till it's over
Over There!
Within the song, you can hear the beginnings of the breezy crack Americans to this day are wont to tell the French: "If it weren't for us, you'd be speaking German", etc. War is something that happens Over There, and that's different from getting your own neighborhood bombed to smithereens. The Commies understood the power of the song. In 1939, after Molotov and Ribbentrop signed the Soviet-German pact, the Communist Party gleefully modified Cohan's hook for propaganda purposes:
The Yanks are not coming!
But then Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and Moscow was all too glad for the Yanks to come over once more. If it weren't for the Yanks, the French would be speaking German. On the other hand, if it weren't for the Yanks, the Germans would be speaking Russian. And, if it weren't for "Over There", George M Cohan would never have become the first entertainer to be honored with the Congressional Gold Medal. "Funny about them giving me a medal," he mused. "All I wrote was a bugle call:" O-ver There!
He died of abdominal cancer in 1942, so, second time around, he saw the boys go over but never lived to see them come back when it was over Over There. In a sense, the post-war world rendered the song obsolete: in Germany and Japan and all manner of other places, even when it was over Over There, the Yanks stayed on. Then came the strange new conflicts of our own century, when no matter how long you're over in Helmand or the Sunni Triangle it's never over Over There.
I quoted it in some column or other not long after 9/11, and I had a thought at the time that it might come back - which, after a fashion, it did. A few years ago, I switched on the TV in my London hotel room and caught an ad for GoCompare - a price-comparison website that finds you the cheapest home and auto insurance, etc. The ads feature an Italian tenor called "Gio Compario" and, just like Enrico Caruso a century earlier, he sings "Over There", albeit with a couple of differences. For the first and only time in his career, Caruso expended considerable effort in dialing back the Italiano in order to make his vowels sound as American as possible, whereas "Gio Compario" (actually a Welsh tenor, Wynne Evans) does his best to sound as floridly Italian as possible. Also the lyric is different:
Go Compare!
Go Compare!
To be sure when you insure first Go Compare!
When your choices are many
You could save a pretty penny
When you go online to Go Compare!
The commercial has been voted Britain's Most Irritating Advertisement for some years. But it's never over Over There: There is no end in sight to "Gio Compario".
From the song that sent America off to war to a comparison-shopping website for car insurance: There's a metaphor for civilizational decay in there somewhere. Johnny, get your quote...
UPDATE: Israel Pickholtz writes from Over There in Jerusalem:
Mark,
When I first heard "Over There" as a child, I was fascinated by the word play "over over there." There is still nothing better.
Indeed. "We won't come back till it's over/Over There!" I should have mentioned that because it's very adroit - vindicating Ira Gershwin's maxim ("A title/Is vital/Once you've it/Prove it") and Cole Porter's theory that you should figure out the ending of a song first and then write up to it. And it's especially good for a song written either in two hours or on a train. It's what my old friend Dillie Keane calls a "Mean To Me" ending, as in:
Mean To Me
Why must you be mean to me?
And then the switcheroo in the last line:
Can't you see what you mean to me?
But Cohan's wind-up is even more impressive because he uses the word in both senses side by side. Unbeatable.
~If you're a Mark Steyn Club member and you don't care for George M Cohan's rum-tumming drums, we have an entirely different kind of verse in the first edition of Mark's readings of classic poetry. As we always say, membership in the Club isn't for everybody, and it doesn't affect access to Song of the Week and our other regular content, but one thing it does give you is the right to get your gun and blast holes all over our comments section. So, if you're a Club member and you're in bellicose mood, then feel free to open fire in the comments. For more on The Mark Steyn Club, see here.
