"When You Come Back (and You Will Come Back, There's the Whole World Waiting for You)"
by Raymond Dixon and Orpheus Quartet
Sheet music courtesy of Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection |
A bravura piece of such bluster and bravado is seemingly very ambiguous if the words track. The refrain starts with "when you come back/ IF you do come back" and then shifts to "when you come back/AND you will come back." There is no resolution of the ambiguity. The rest of the lyric is patriotic and romantic encouragement for the departing doughboy. Like the Long Boy, he is encouraged to return with "some little thing / that you get from the king" for his girlfriend who also exhorts him to "drop me a line from Germany" and then, with his cohorts, he is styled a "Yankee doodle-doo." The invocation of the revolutionary spirit, again, sets the American soldier up as a crusader for right and democracy. The "if" must have been troubling for some, but the uncertainty is masked by Cohan with the martial air laid over the whole affair that gives this doughboy more determination than his Long Boy counterpart.
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