Then upon her death left. It was opened as a Public Museum in 1963. We are now more than 50 years as an institution in washington, d. C. It is good to see all of you here tonight. Our program is entitled smile while you kiss me sad adieu. World war i songs. Let me introduce our speaker quickly. We like to remind people here that president wilson imagines a world at peace and proposed a plan to achieve that vision. That is a remarkable accomplishment when we take about it from the Vantage Point of our lives 100 years later. It is more remarkable if we transport ourselves back to his time and think about the world in which he lived and the ideas that were abroad at the time and the remarkable accomplishment that it was for him in the middle of a world war to imagine what the world ought to look like at peace and propose that that should be our default position, that there ought to be a league of nations and nations ought not to engage in aggressive war. This house allows us to take that trip in time. We are surrounded in this room by gifts of state that president wilson received. One of the reason he received so many gifts, because he was the First American president to go to europe in office. But secondly because the world so hoped for him to succeed in the mission he had taken on of ending the catastrophe that was world war i. It is hard for us to think now about how shocking world war i was to the people who had to live through it. And so the music of that era, like this house, is something that can transport us back to that time. As you will see this afternoon, hearing from michael, that you will have a sense of the music existed and the america that existed before the war. And the music that reveals to us the america that came out of that war. You will see a transformation. Michael lasser is a writer and teacher about american music. He has written two books. We have them available after his lecture. He is in the process of writing a third. He is the author of americas songs ii. This is a companion piece to a book he wrote, america songs, the stories behind hollywood and tin pan alley. He established himself as a songbird. I have heard he is not going to be singing this evening. Im sorry to disappoint you. He is working on a book called the song is us, love, lyrics and america 1900. I am looking forward to that fourth volume about the hiphop thing that he is such an expert on. [laughter] he is a graduate of dartmouth. He has been lecturing on music and songs and america for 30 years. Let me introduce michael lasser. [applause] thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Im going to be treating songs as in affect documents. In effect documents. That is, when you listen to a song from your own time, somehow it is a mere on a mirror on that time. More about love than anything else but attitudes toward love and romance and sex and marriage obviously change over the first half of the 20th century in case you had not noticed. Take my word for it. And songs reflect that. But for us, 100 years after the songs of world war i, those songs are not a mirror. They serve as a window and let us look back on what people were thinking and feeling and how they behaved. Songs are a good way to get at it because they have no aspiration beyond having you like it well enough to buy it. Irving berlin said a good song is one that sells. And he was not simply saying, i need more money because he was a multimillionaire when he said it. What he was saying is that he trusted the judgment of the people. If you go out and buy my song for whatever it costs, . 15, 79 cents on a record, it does not matter, if you downloaded from the internet, you are in effect voting with your pocketbook. So a good song is one that sells. It is the democratic, lower case d, point of view. You can make the case that the great songwriters from the first half of the 20th century were democratic populists, although they did not see themselves that way. The irony and that is that they the irony in all that is they were millionaire democratic populists. You do not see that all that often. They never lost their ability to pick up what was in the air. When they walked down the street, they were listening for a catchphrase. Some slang. When they read the newspapers, they were looking for a story they could turn into a song. So when war was declared in 1914. At a time when tin pan alley now had come into existence. And was flowering. You all know what tin pan alley was. You are all nodding. Tell me. What was tin pan alley . Notice how the room just changed. [laughter] what was tin pan alley . A neighborhood in a particular block lets look at more than geography. And get to the heart of what it was. It was more of an idea or concept. The songwriters would gather there. They did. Why . No. It is where the Music Publishers were. And most of the songwriters in the early years of the 20th century, the professional songwriters, i am not talking about charlie with a guitar and a pencil. Songwriters were under contract to publishers. And they would crank out what the market wanted, because they were told to do so. Tin pan alley is the home of Music Publishing in the United States between roughly, again, you know when you get into years it is never very useful. They are arbitrary. 1895 to 1935. Give or take. During the 1930s, hollywood was becoming with talkies and musical, the studios bought up the publishers and moved their offices to california. They do not want to pay royalties anymore. Even though tin pan alley still exists after that, and comes to me to be a generic term for american popular music. In its heyday, it was located in a place just off broadway in the west 20s. And was where the songs came from by the thousands. These people did not sit around waiting for inspiration. It is a highly overrated gift. When you limit yourself to work produced by inspiration, you end up with a very, very small bibliography. You force it. Some days you fill up wastebaskets. Occasionally you have a day when you do not. But you work. The coming of the war, even though we were determined to stay out of it, i am not going to do a history of isolationism because i am here to talk about songs and not give you a capsule of history of world war i. The coming of the war was a boon to the song business. That is, publishers and songwriters did look around for markets to appeal to and they looked for a way to appeal to those markets. With the coming of the war in europe, even though we were determined to stay out of it, there was not surprisingly a wave of patriotism in this country. That started to produce songs because patriotism is the exactly the kind of clear emotion that something as brief as a song can do something with. Remember that most of the songs i am talking about and most of the songs written during what has come to be known as the Great American songbook were 32 bars long. They fit on one side of a 78 rpm record. If youre old enough to remember those, you know you could get at most three minutes and 20 seconds of music on the side. Then you flipped it over and had another three minutes and 20 seconds. That is what as a kid, i bought them for 79 cents. It was not until the late 1940s that you get the lp, which promises you about 40 minutes of music. But you still, if you are listening to a concerto or symphony, you have to flip it to get the whole symphony. When you bought an album of the symphony, it came with its own wheelbarrow. It was so heavy. It was like a big book. You put it on the record player and every three minutes you had to, every five minutes because they used 12 inch records, you had to change it to the next recording. You never heard a whole, but you you never heard it whole, but you heard it. That was the point. With the coming of the war, we started writing songs. And the first songs we wrote were about staying out of the war. You have got more songs on the list than i can ever play. I thought you would like to see some titles. On the list of lyrics you have got more songs than i am going to play because there is not enough time. Most of these songs are available. You can go to itunes or amazon. You can go to the public library. There are collections. I do not have any secret connections to find the songs. They are out there if you want to hear songs of world war i. Are there as many available as there were in world war ii . Of course not. The recording business was much more sophisticated. Distribution was much more effective. But, by the way, there is one song on the list i want to point out to you apropos of nothing because it is a good story. Under 1918, you will see a song called smile and show your dimple by Irving Berlin, who sometimes i think wrote every song. And names like cole porter and George Gershwin are just pseudonyms for Irving Berlin. Does anybody happen to know the song . Do not sing it. No. I did not mean that. I want to surprise them. He published it. It did not do well. He pulled it and put it back in his trunk. They never threw anything away. Rogers and hart wrote new lyrics to the song that became blue moon. They never give up on the song. That does not mean they all succeeded, but sometimes they do. So berlin pulled the song and in 1932 he was trying to write an act i finale for a political review called as thousands cheer. He couldnt come up with a song. He remembered this song from world war i. And he pulled it and listen to it. And he said, that will do. And he wrote a new lyrics for it. Would you like to sing with me . In your easter bonnet, smile and show your dimple you will find it is very simple it is about a young woman who has kissed her doughboy goodbye and she is standing on the platform. Someone told her someone older sees her and tries to comfort her. Smile and show your dimple. Hes coming home. Were going to beat the kaiser. Isnt that a neat story . The first song to become a hit in world war i, and by the way, it is thought to be of most musical war. More songs in response to the war than any other war in American History. Because tin pan alley was so explosively productive. There was a young woman who wrote a song. And there were a number of songs like this. I am not going to play this one. Because the recording the only recording i could find was so bad in quality you would not have been able to get the words. But i did include the words for you. It is called the first one. It is the second one. We take our hats off to you, mr. Wilson. Written by a woman who went on to become a professional songwriter who went on to write a lot of the materials for fanny brice when she was in the ziegfeld follies. There were the songs of the beginning of the war that are clearly about not getting in. But they become much more personal. We take our hats off to you, mr. Wilson, is a generalized salute. It is a kind of thing a Group Marches down the street singing. Popular songs had to do that, but popular songs are mainly good at the emotionalism that exists between two people. In all of the history of popular music in this country, probably 98 of the songs have two characters. I and you. And it is about what is going on or not between us. So in a typical song is when you start getting into the intense personal emotions. Now, in the civil war, young men going off to war, never having been away from home before. And very young. And it was a much less sophisticated country. A lot of the farm boys. A lot of them immigrants. An awful lot of the union army spoke with an irish accent during the civil war. They really did fight a good part of that war. The songs of the civil war that were in effect love songs were about a boy and his mother. There were very few that were stories of romantic love, about how much i miss you and i will come home to you. She is home saying i will be faithful. Very few of those. There are some sentimental ballads like cora lee and lorena in the south which are songs of praise for an idealized young woman but that is as close as you come. In the civil war, they are mainly about mom. Junior is writing a letter home. One of the best of them is a song called just before the battle, mother. During world war ii, jump. There are a few mother songs. Mother is proud that you are in uniform, sonny. That has not survived. [laughter] the love songs of the war are largely about a couple whether married or not. Separated. So the emotions of warfare in songs in love songs, and you will see this a little bit later are about separation, loneliness, longing, the hope of return. You find those in the love songs of world war i and the love songs of world war ii. And those three wars, civil, one and two are really the wars where there is a large body of song because there was a sense of the nation engaged, that there was not in the wars since. There are not a lot of songs about korea. And i am not being snarky. It was a different kind of war. The people were not engaged. In vietnam you had songs in which two groups are warring with one another. Give peace a chance. Im an okie from the skokie. Iraq and afghanistan do not produce a lot of songs. In a way, they are invisible, and we are not as a nation engaged enough. We do not have a citizen army anymore. That gets in the way of that. So in world war i, you have a mix. In the middle between the two wars and it showed. There were songs about mom and songs about sweeties. Soldier sings i am going to pin my medal on the girl i left behind in world war i. There are other differences between world war i and world war ii love songs. It is the mother song that i want to get to. Again, it is the idea of staying out of it. Delivering a kind of anthem in a way that the first song is an anthem and yet also capitalizing on the kind of direct emotionalism that popular songs are good at. It is called i did not raise my boy to be a soldier. It is not that mothers did not raise their children, not lets all march in favor of mothers who opposed the war. But i did not raise my son to be a soldier. Listen to the words. I do not vouch for their accuracy. I took them off the internet. I confess i did not do a meticulous check between the recording and the lyrics, but they are close. Wrong song. Sorry. I just screwed up. Stay with me. I should not be allowed near technology. Three thousand miles from home, an American Army is fighting for you. Everything you hold worthwhile is at stake. Invoking the spirits of our forefathers the army asks your , unblinking support. High ideals for which america stands. That is pershing. 10 million soldiers who may never return again 10 million are the ones who died in vain in sorrow in her lonely years, i heard a mother murmur through her tears i did not raise my boy to be a soldier i brought him off to be my pride and joy. Its time to lay the sword and runaway there would be no more today there would be no war today as mothers always say i did not raise my boy to be a soldier ok. There had been, as you know, a great wave of immigration into the country beginning in the years after the civil war. People not from ireland and scotland and england but people from different parts of europe. And there was a certain amount of resistance to them. There was a rise in nativism as people began to arrive they were russians and italians and poles and jews and greeks. And they werent like us. And over the next 50 years they changed what us means. But it was a great struggle. There had also in the years leading up to the war been an increase in emigration from germany. Increase in immigration from germany. There were a lot more new americans who were of german extraction, had been born in germany and came here. So here you have got all these people from all these Different Countries who have not been here that long. On top of it, you have got all of these people from germany for crying out loud. Were they going to fight for america . Of course, nobody knew the answer. They neednt have worried. They came here because they wanted to come here and they joined up and they fought. But it was still an open question. So Irving Berlin wrote a song aimed in 1916 aimed specifically at this audience. Because the tide was turning. There was a sense increasingly that america was siding with the allies, that we were more interested in taking the side of england than germany. At the beginning the main feeling was, lets not get involved with these people. Lets stay out. There was no sense. And the special relationship that we have forged with the english did not exist. This came after world war i. So it was tricky. It was tricky. So berlin writes this song because he thinks he knows what we ought to be doing, and he sees where the country is beginning to go. And he wants to make sure the new immigrants will be americans. I have to change the track. Give me one minute. Wrong track. Sorry. I should have someone doing this for me. I am going to waste a lot of my time and yours fooling around with this. But you can edit it out, right . [indiscernible] yes. Try three and see what we get. Go back, really . Let it play. What is that tune i hear . Playing in my ear come on along come on along in alexanders ragtime band hes going over there to do his share when alexander takes his ragtime band over there hell take them one by one hell put the germans they will throw their guns away hip hip hooray theyll get so excited they will come over near and far and go back to berlin all will know he has no chance when alexander takes his ragtime band to france now, i came in here and rehearsed, so imagine how bad it would be if i had not rehearsed . Up once we have gone into the war. At let me fill in the pieces are oddly and out of the songs come up, i will play some for you. We get that berlin song called ets all be americans now which comes soon after a group of songs that were a response to a specific incident. That is what really galvanizes an american patriotism. What really galvanize his american supports for the allies do you know what the event was . The sinking of the lusitania. And in the months after the sinking, there are dozens of songs about the sinking of the lusitania. All of which have the same basic point of view. It was a dastardly thing to do. They were heartless those songs, whether the songs are shaping Public Opinion or responding to Public Opinion is hard to know because they come out over a series of months. My best guess is that both were happening. Of thee sinking lusitania, everything changes and now it is a matter of getting to the war. , tensions build, and there we go. To hisg you just listen want of a series of songs about 1911. Der that go back to what are we talking about . One . Is the important alexander pross ragtime band alexanders ragtime band. He was working in a tough bar in chinatown, and ended up being told to write a song lyric. Its a whole story. , and realized he could make a few bucks. He made . 38 royalties on that f