"My Dream of the Big Parade"
by Peerless Quartet with Billy Murray

The recording literature is full of parades and returning troops and the triumph accorded to them all. In "My Dream of the Big Parade," the event of the song is an actual dream—making the horrific reality of the song suddenly the surrogate for the fantasy. The dream, and thus the song, is packed with "gold star mothers, sisters and brothers," "one-legged pals coming home to their gals," "millions" of sailors, doughboys, "buddies wounded and gassed," and a truly remarkable narrated passage which validates the horror of the war for perhaps the first time in American lyric:

Valleys of ruins, mountains of mud
Beautiful rivers, rivers of blood
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Millions of cooties crawling around
Pieces of shrapnel, pieces of shell
Many a cross where somebody fell
Fighting and fighting a horrible war
And God only knows what you're fighting it for.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ah, then came their journey over the foam
But all that went over didn't come home.
(refrain)

This is the war of combatants, of men who question and men who watched other men die, this is not the fantasy that the song writers had been spoon feeding the public from 1917 through 1919. The fantasy dies in a final irony at the beginning of the song when the singer says "Last night I was dreaming of days that are gone / Of days that you might recall." The days of whilom feeling is enhanced by the dream being projected on the wall of the bedroom "just like a photoplay." Then the singer says:

Once more I saw it all
It was just a dream you see
But how real it seemed to me.

In what is surely a deliberate ambiguity of pronoun, we are left to ponder which is the dream, the images on the wall or the war itself now that it is so far in the past. The list of particulars suggest that the war left sufficiently vivid memories to be labeled real, but we are reminded of the Confucian tale of the priest who slept and dreamed of a butterfly. When he awoke, he could not tell if he dreamed of a butterfly or if he were the butterfly dreaming he was a man dreaming. Such is the sophistication of this song and the tragic message it brought to a nation beset by crime, economic downturn, prejudice, and distrust. Wilson and idealism were dead, the economy was building to Black Thursday and the Depression, and the songwriters had turned from enthusiasm and promotion to introspection and evaluation. That was not a happy combination in such times. Predictably, the nation reflected the tone set by its songs.

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