Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  While HMV trumpeted his return, Decca Records were eager to be seen as even more patriotic. ‘As in 1914, so in 1939’, they declared in an advertisement, ‘Decca Keeps The Flag Flying With Entertainment for the Troops and the Home.’ A flurry of suitably war-themed records was released, including Annette Mills’s composition ‘Adolf’; Gracie Fields’s ‘Old Soldiers Never Die’; revivals of anthems from the Great War; a medley of soldiers’ songs from Jack Hylton’s band; and comedian Tommy Handley’s inspired coupling of ‘Who Is That Man (Who Looks Like Charlie Chaplin)’ and ‘The Night We Met in a Blackout’. Cabaret star Ronald Frankau penned a droll supper-club novelty entitled ‘Heil Hitler! Ja! Ja! Ja!’, which made the great dictator sound like a harmless fool. (‘There are plenty more better verses,’ he mumbled at the end of the record, ‘but I’m not allowed to sing them.’) Arthur Askey reworked the popular song ‘Run Rabbit Run’ as ‘Run Adolf Run’, delighting King George VI so much that the monarch asked for the revised lyrics to be sent forthwith to Buckingham Palace. The popularity of such songs placed an enormous strain upon the stockpile of raw materials. As sales soared amidst the decline of BBC airplay, record companies agreed to ration the number of records that could be issued, and by 1942 there was a noticeable scarcity of discs in the shops.

  The most enduring song of the war’s early weeks was ‘We’ll Meet Again’. As the academic Christina Baade wrote, ‘The song combined the first person4 plural, which had been so popular in more jingoistic numbers, with romantic longing and an insistent faith in the couple’s eventual reunion. It was also unabashedly sentimental, a mood that bewildered critics who called for more bracing wartime fare.’ Soldiers were often ambivalent about the song, one of them asking the BBC to refrain from playing material which reminded them that they would shortly be bidding farewell to their loved ones. The song became indissolubly linked to a young band singer, of whom the Daily Express trumpeted: ‘There’s a new star5 … She is quite unsophisticated. But Vera Lynn sings sentimental songs that sell more records each month than Bing Crosby, the Mills Brothers, the Andrews Sisters or any of that formidable gang of transatlantic songsters.’ As a final compliment, the Express added: ‘She sings high in her nose, and she never wavers from a note. In this age, when crooning is the rage, such simple balladry is startling.’ When Lynn was added to the cast of BBC radio’s Sincerely Yours, another newspaper declared: ‘Vera brings joy and comfort6 to thousands in the Forces and those they love. She is establishing herself as Everybody’s Friend. Keep the good work going, Vera.’ She was so popular with the troops that the BBC forbade any comedian from imitating her on air. Indeed, disliking Vera Lynn – and there were plenty who did, on musical grounds alone – was considered nearly as unpatriotic as hanging the swastika from a window. Behind the doors of BBC committee rooms, however, as Christina Baade has discovered, there was disquiet that (in the words of the head of the Empire Entertainments Unit) ‘The type of songs being written7 and sung by [Lynn] has a drugging effect on troops, but drugs are bad for one. It will have the opposite effect to making any of them “fighting mad” and rather turn them to “wishing it could all be over and done with”.’

  Realising that the armed forces might require stiffer stuff, the BBC launched forces programming, containing ‘hot’ jazz numbers which were rarely aired to the public at home. (This prompted complaints that the regular morning service was sometimes followed by indecorous swing tunes.) Forces broadcasts also demolished one of the great taboos of BBC programming: for the first time, dance music was allowed to invade the previously sacred schedule of a Sunday evening. When civilisation survived this sacrilege, the British homeland was given the same licence, and Mantovani’s orchestra occupied a space that would once have been devoted to classical music.

  In the summer of 1940, the BBC responded to the agony of the Dunkirk evacuation by launching a new form of programming: two half-hour slots, mid-morning and mid-afternoon, entitled Music While You Work, which were intended to double the output of those in munitions and aircraft factories. Their contents were lively but not too engaging. The American polka tune ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’ was barred from inclusion, despite its enormous popularity, because it inspired workers to drop their tools and clap along.

  Musicians in dance bands occupied an ambiguous position during the war years. Many were called up, and formed service bands, such as the Skyrockets, the Blue Rockets and the Squadronaires, whose swing music was hotter than anything from Britain’s more renowned orchestras. Those who remained behind were charged with raising morale, but often maligned as unpatriotic because they weren’t fighting. ‘Swingsters Want Exemption8 From Military Service’, claimed the Evening Standard in 1940, while the Daily Express countered with ‘Many Dance Band Boys9 Dodge the Army’. Neither story was based on fact; nor was the rumour that the popular American-born pianist Charlie Kunz was using his BBC broadcasts to send coded messages to the Nazis via his keyboard. Another even more outlandish story was accurate: bandleader Arthur Lally, then in his late 30s, demanded that the War Office allow him to fly a plane over Germany so that he could personally drop a bomb on Hitler at his mountain retreat. When this offer was politely refused, and doctors suggested that he might consider more restful pursuits, Lally was so outraged that he committed suicide.

  Musicians shared the hazards faced by the civilian population. The American bandleader Carroll Gibbons had been resident in the UK since 1929, and often broadcast from the Savoy hotel during the Blitz of 1940. During one performance, a German bomb knocked Gibbons and his musicians off the bandstand, and Noël Coward had to man the piano to keep the transmission afloat. The country’s most revered swing band, an all-black West Indian unit led by Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson, was performing during a March 1941 air raid at the Café de Paris in London. A bomb hit the club, killing Johnson and his sax player, and at least thirty members of the audience. Four months later, Britain’s most popular crooner, Al Bowlly, was killed during another raid as he slept in his London flat. His final recording was Irving Berlin’s hopeful valediction to Hitler, ‘When That Man is Dead and Gone’.

  A more subtle challenge was faced by Victor Silvester, once the world champion foxtrot and waltz dancer, co-writer of the definitive guide to Modern Ballroom Dancing and, by 1935, bandleader. He abhorred the tendency of other orchestras to alter the given tempo of a tune, protesting that it made dancing impossible. Instead, he guaranteed ‘strict time’ musicianship: melodic, silky with strings, and rhythmically unwavering. He was the obvious choice to lead a wartime programme entitled Dancing Club, in which he read out the required steps for each number, then paused for several seconds while his audience wrote them down. He discovered that the Brooklyn-born propagandist William Joyce, known to everyone as Lord Haw-Haw, was intercepting the BBC’s signal from Berlin, and filling these silences with anti-British rhetoric.

  Other efforts by Germany’s propaganda ministry were equally cunning. Between 1940 and 1943, the Nazi regime financed the recording and broadcast of dance-band records intended to dent British resolve. They were credited to Charlie and His Orchestra, the leader being a crooner named Karl Schwedler. Charlie’s strategy was simple: he performed ostensibly straight renditions of popular songs, but revised the lyrics to add a crudely satirical message. Like Lord Haw-Haw, Charlie masqueraded as a British aristocrat. ‘Here is Winston Churchill’s latest tearjerker’, he would announce gleefully, before singing ‘The Germans are driving me crazy.’ On ‘Makin’ Whoopee’, he impersonated the Jewish-American crooner Eddie Cantor, with barbed couplets such as ‘Another war, another profit, Another Jewish business trick.’ (Charlie’s lyrics did not rhyme or scan quite as meticulously as the originals.) There is no evidence that these German short-wave broadcasts had any propaganda value. But bizarrely, an era in which American music was officially verboten in Germany proved to be a golden age for the country’s jazz: ‘The fact that Nazi Germany10 should become the swing band centre of Europe is the supreme irony of dance b
and history’, historian Albert McCarthy noted.

  There was a similar flowering of jazz in France under German occupation and Vichy government. Clubs and dance halls closed briefly when the Nazis arrived in Paris, then adjusted themselves to the new regime. Aficionados of swing called themselves zazous, a name inspired by Cab Calloway. Their anthem was ‘Je Suis Swing’ by Johnny Hess, effectively a declaration of defiance to fascism. The zazous defied official bans on late-night jazz, and the German authorities appear to have ignored these breaches of discipline, feeling that it was better for young Frenchmen to be jitterbugging than plotting with the French Resistance. (Many did both.) When Vichy propaganda told the French people, ‘C’est l’heure de travail’ (‘It’s time to go to work’), the vocalist Georgius recorded a provocative song entitled ‘Mon Heure de Swing’. French radio announcers took heart from this cultural rebellion, and began to broadcast a diet of American jazz records, carefully giving all the titles in French to obscure their origins (and the fact that many were written by Jewish composers). Jazz became a symbol of freedom, as the historian Matthew Jordan wrote: ‘The Allied troops11 entered Paris on August 25, 1944, and the celebration began. Once again [as after the Great War of 1914–18], jazz was the collective soundtrack for the liberation of France.’

  For the established stars of French music hall and cabaret who remained throughout the occupation, plotting an ethical course was perilous. If they refused to perform for their compatriots, they risked being branded as disloyal. If they took part in entertainment that was officially sanctioned by the invaders, or sang for German officers, they might be classed as traitors. Jewish musicians and singers fled, if they could; others had to submit the texts of every song they performed to the German authorities, or be barred from public appearances. The best-known French entertainer of the era was Maurice Chevalier, a Hollywood star since the birth of the talkies. He was a national hero in France, but his decision to appear on radio programmes during the occupation, and to perform for German officers, caused him to be classified as a collaborator after the liberation. He was refused permission to fulfil a theatrical engagement in London in March 1945, because he was considered not ‘likely to contribute12 to the British war effort’. A decade later, he had been forgiven by most, and toured the world with a cabaret act which included a love song in German, which he delivered in a screaming pastiche of the Führer’s familiar voice.

  Perhaps the cruellest use of popular music in wartime Europe occurred at the Czech garrison town of Terezín (Theresienstadt to the German occupiers), which became a holding camp for Jews who were being sent to Auschwitz. In 1944, it was the location for a German propaganda film intended for international consumption, called The Führer Gives a Town to the Jews. The camp was painted and filled with props for the movie-making, to ensure it resembled a functioning urban community. Happy young Jews were pictured at work there, entertained by a swing band called the Ghetto Swingers. Once the film was completed, the participants were sent to Auschwitz, where they formed what musical units they could to ease the agony of their fellow prisoners. Most of the Ghetto Swingers perished there, while cabaret star Kurt Gerron, who was forced by the Germans to direct the film, was marched to the gas chamber by guards who insisted that he sing one of the melodies from The Threepenny Opera for which he was most famous.

  Men in America’s armed forces13 abroad indicate a clear preference for taking their music hot. At the rate he’s going, Johnny Doughboy will do an even greater job of spreading the gospel of the Dixieland beat than was done in the first World War, when the entire European continent was made jazz-conscious.

  Billboard magazine, October 1942

  One name band leader14 experienced a tough two or three minutes the other evening while singing ‘This is Worth Fighting For’. At the end of the tagline, one of the dancers loudly demanded, ‘Well, why don’t you get into a uniform and fight, then?’

  Billboard magazine, August 1942

  Little more than twenty-four hours after the Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base in December 1941, which resulted in the deaths of more than 2,000 people, the American government formally declared war on the Empire of Japan. No sooner was the announcement made than comedians Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, stars of the military comedy Buck Privates, were whisked into a Hollywood recording studio. They recorded a spectacularly ill-timed vaudeville routine with an orchestra and vocal quartet entitled ‘Laugh Laugh Laugh’, the chorus of which announced: ‘Things have been worse before.’

  This was not destined to become the most enduring American song of the Second World War. Indeed, as composer Hoagy Carmichael noted in 1942, ‘I think everyone in the music15 world is conscious of the lack of an outstanding popular song in the present war. For some reason or other, nothing written so far has clicked. I believe it’s because the tunes haven’t gotten underneath the surface enough. Their treatment of the war has been too superficial. America is in a situation today that calls for a tune with real depth of sentiment. I think people are past the stage where they’re impressed by songs that indulge merely in flag-waving or boasting of our national might.’

  That was not the prevailing assumption as war began, and music publishers reported being ‘bombarded with variations16 of the “Beat the Axis” and “Smash the Japs” type tunes’, as professional songwriters competed to display their patriotism. Early entries included ‘Let’s Remember Pearl Harbor’, ‘Slap the Jap Right Off the Map’, ‘The Sun Will Be Setting for the Land of the Rising Sun’ and ‘When Those Little Yellow Bellies Meet the Cohens and the Kellys’. The most successful songs in this vein were ‘You’re a Sap Mr Jap’, recorded by Carl Hoff’s orchestra; ‘Goodbye Mama (I’m Off to Yokohama)’, a swing tune by Teddy Powell; and drummer/bandleader Gene Krupa’s ‘Keep ’Em Flying’, which began with growling saxophones imitating the planes of the USAAF.

  The sentimental ballad ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ – an American song, despite its title – dominated the airwaves in the weeks after Pearl Harbor, reflecting the public need for reassurance. ‘Miss You’ (Dinah Shore) and ‘I’ll Pray For You’ (the Andrews Sisters) mined a seam familiar from the previous catastrophe, of girls waiting loyally for their boys to return from the front line. Peggy Lee, with the Goodman band, revived Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’. ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me)’ by Glenn Miller highlighted the fear that these girlfriends might not be as faithful as they promised.

  The folk singer Carson Robison picked up sales throughout the early months of the war with a succession of sarcastic ‘tributes’ to the enemy leaders, such as ‘Mussolini’s Letter to Hitler’. Musical madcap Spike Jones fashioned a satirical attack on Hitler, ‘Der Fuehrer’s Face’, which became the theme of a Walt Disney cartoon (Donald Duck in Nutziland). But as America’s war entered its first full year, three songs became instant standards. ‘This Is Worth Fighting For’ portrayed America as a land of swaying cornfields and country cabins, where rosy-cheeked kids waited with their apron-clad mothers for daddy to come home. ‘There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere’ tied the hillbilly market to the war effort, Elton Britt’s rendition outselling every other offering in that genre for the next two years. Most successful of all was ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition’, available in various competing versions by choirs and quartets. It was based on the quite possibly apocryphal tale of a sermon given by a navy chaplain during the Pearl Harbor attack. Combining military zeal with religion, it tapped simultaneously into two sources of American pride, and it prompted many rivals, the most enduring of which was ‘Comin’ In on a Wing and a Prayer’.

  By April 1942, there was talk that a forthcoming Hollywood musical, Holiday Inn, would contain a Bing Crosby ballad guaranteed to seize the country’s heart. By September, ‘White Christmas’ was on course to become the best-selling single of all time, securing the first of its more than 50 million sales over the next seven decades. Lushly orchestrated, the hum of a chorale
adding to its atmosphere of wistful reverence, the disc’s immediate success owed something to its wartime context: the narrator was dreaming of a white Christmas because he was destined to spend it in a humid Far East jungle. But patriotism and romance were not enough in themselves to inspire such an instinctive response from the public: the hook was the low, rumbling purr of Bing Crosby’s voice, as warming as the healthiest of Yuletide log fires. A year later, Bing offered another seasonal message. ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’, he crooned, and more than a million disc-buyers chose to believe, against all the military evidence, that it might be true for them and their particular boy. ‘The American GI17 is getting the war songs he wants,’ reckoned Irving Berlin, ‘something sentimental about home and love.’ Billboard magazine agreed that ‘our war songs have no reality to lads who are learning how to annihilate Fascists’, and concluded that GIs were choosing ‘to get their belts from the solid stuff’ – swing, in other words.

  Aware that music would perform a vital service in maintaining morale, the US government attempted to co-ordinate the entertainment industry. The military had already founded the USO (United Service Organizations) to arrange concerts for the troops at which top names from Hollywood and New York’s nightclubs performed free of charge. Once war was declared, the OWI (Office of War Information) issued complex instructions to songwriters and publishers about the material that would aid the war effort. There should be no lyrics about the horror of war, and soldiers should only be described as dying in circumstances that would provide a heroic example for their comrades. Families and loved ones should be portrayed as patient, loyal and fully committed to the American cause. There should be no doubts expressed about America’s part in the war, and no hint of troubles at home, in the form of strikes or food shortages. Songs must convey the message that America was going to win the war, but only with a determined effort from every participant. Lyrics that hymned the praises of airmen or sailors rather than soldiers should not be published. Most importantly, lyricists had to affirm American superiority without suggesting that the enemy was stupid or inferior: the worst enemy during wartime was complacency. Songwriters struggled to remain creative whilst stepping through this potential minefield. In addition, restrictions were imposed on songs already in circulation. Anything that sounded German or Italian was banned from jukeboxes, and US citizens with roots in those countries consoled themselves with polkas and traditional folksongs.