About the CD
The Great War: An American Musical Fantasy is the first release in a new series of compact discs from Archeophone Records called our Critical Issues series, in which we examine large historical events or trends through the lens of the records that were a part of the event. This project began at the instigation of a regular collaborator of ours, Clarence Johnson, whose interest in the music and musical ephemera of that great conflict was prompted largely by his grandfather, an Oklahoma veteran of World War I. In surveying the immense amount of material available for inclusion on these two discs, we quickly identified a striking tendency of American recordings during the war years to treat the hostilities from a safe, detached distance: it was all happening “over there”; we would march over, kill the kaiser, and save the flower of Europe from desolation. The songs showed no awareness of the danger of modern warfare, and when they did, it was in the service of a joke, as in “I’d Feel at Home if They’d Let Me Join the Army,” where Billy Murray complains that in family squabbles, “I’m always mustered out.”
Treating the war in joke-like fashion is a pattern that runs through a good portion of the recorded material from that period, and that provided our subtitle, An American Musical Fantasy, because the records showed that U.S. involvement in the war was, certainly at the beginning, an imagined, fanciful, vicarious one. Rather than compile a collection of “songs the doughboys sang,” we wanted to paint a picture of how Americans handled the stress of war in the vast international theater through humorous recordings. As earlier Archeophone releases have demonstrated, some of America’s best-known singing comedians, such as Bert Williams and Nora Bayes, had repertoires filled with topical humor about the war, and early jazz singer Marion Harris began her career doing comical dialect numbers about “darkeys” in the war effort, as in “Good-Bye Alexander (Good-Bye Honey Boy”).
Besides joking around with the war, another striking element to the recordings appeared as well. Before the U.S. joined the war, protest songs, German nationalistic anthems, and differences of opinion about the conflict marked recordings on the American market. Once the U.S. joined the fray, the recording industry’s war-themed product shifted sharply to pro-war, patriotic selections, effectively cutting off any kind of debate. This continues until a good piece after the fighting ceased, when in the mid-1920s, questions about the wisdom of American involvement pop up again, finding most poignant expression in “My Dream of the Big Parade.”
Since our initial conversations with Clarence Johnson, a playlist has been suggested and revised, sound remastered, and research done that has covered issues of music, censorship, and how the record industry responded when pressured to demonstrate itself as a critical industry. Not only did the talking machine trade emerge from the crucible of the Great War as an essential industry, it also coalesced into a major mass-culture media source that would direct taste and opinion for the rest of the century.
