"There's a Long, Long Trail"
by John McCormack
Sheet music courtesy of Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection |
Written by two Yalies in 1913, this was not intended to be a war song. Zo Elliott and Stoddard King struck the same balance that characterized "Roses of Picardy": a brilliantly simple melody coupled with a subtly melancholy lyric of love and separation. The song was immediately popular—as a love song—everywhere it was sung. It did not become one of the anthems of the war until British troops embraced it as they left British ports. It is a song of dreams and moonlight, and all the icons that are traditionally attached to young lovers and their peculiar psychoses:
Nights are growing very lonely,
Days are very long;
I'm a-growing weary only
List'ning for your song;
Old remembrances are thronging
Through my memory,
Till it seems the world is full of dreams
Just to call you back to me.
But except for the quality of the lyric and melody, it is not remarkably different from any of a number of similar love songs that were popular at the time. For an American public that did not know war, did not deem it necessary to concern itself with "that" war, and was very content to leave the Europeans to fight among themselves, the long, long trail was only another version of an old, much loved, routine. For British soldiers and their lovers, families, and friends, the references were all too clear and "Long, Long Trail" became a heart-wrenching dirge for the dead and dying, and an eloquent panegyric for those about to die.
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