Forgotten Soldier Boy: War and the Politics of Country Music

I will begin by saying what I mean by the "politics" of country music. I hope that the phrase will become clearer as we proceed, but for starters I mean the ideological, gender, class, regional, and racial politics expressed or implied within the music itself; the politics of the country music industry and of competing venues such as the Internet; the ascribed position of country music within established hierarchies of taste; and the many political uses to which country music has been put over the years. Today I will use the phrase mainly to refer to the music's treatment of controversial subjects or issues.

Besides engaging the specific topic of country music and war, I hope to illustrate some things I believe to be true about the music in general. First, that country music provides a remarkably revealing window into American culture. It also is and long has been an important shaping element of that culture. Moreover, in its nuanced attention to the hopes and fears, strengths and weaknesses, and values and aspirations of ordinary people, and in its mobilization of the wonderful expressiveness of their vernacular language, country music is one of our most characteristic and valuable art forms -- in times of both war and peace.

And now to come to our specific topic: during the eighty years since its birth in the 1920s, how has country music dealt with war? I will base my remarks on a preliminary list I have compiled of about two hundred titles. I would expect an exhaustive search to turn up at least twice this many songs, and even at that I am not including either atom bomb songs, of which there are at least dozens, or Cold War songs such as Lula Belle and Scotty's "I'm No Communist" or Ferlin Huskey's "Let's Keep the Communists Out."

My list tells me first of all that there are country songs about every war the United States has ever participated in, from the Revolution to the current misbegotten escapade we call the War on Terror. And there will doubtless be country songs about our approaching war against Iraq, as well as whatever military adventures or misadventures follow it.

This is true even if one requires that to be a "war song," a song's subject and theme must specifically mention war. But the occurrence of a war affects the public's mood and topical preferences so profoundly that songs not specifically about war can also become "war songs." Porter Wagoner's nostalgic mid-1965 "Green, Green Grass of Home" was in no identifiable way "about" war. But thousands of young rural southern boys from poor families, who were the first Vietnam-era draftees, made it their own by listening yearningly to it again and again in the middle of the Asian jungle.

How have these songs distributed themselves over the various wars, and over the many themes they treat? The largest number (fifty-five) center on World War II, and Vietnam is next with thirty-eight, compared to the Civil War's thirteen, Korea's twelve, and World War I's five. Ideologically the songs range from Carson Robison's bellicose World War II boast, "We're Gonna Have to Slap the Dirty Little Jap (And Uncle Sam's the Guy Who Can Do It)" to Steve Earle's recent "John Walker's Blues," to which I will return presently. Strongly patriotic songs such as Bob Wills's "Silver Dew on the Bluegrass Tonight" of 1945, Sgt. Barry Sadler's infamous "Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley" (1971), and Lee Greenwood's ubiquitous and vapid "God Bless the U.S.A." of the mid-eighties far outnumber those that express ambivalence or protest. A quarter of the songs refer to death (including three songs on the Vietnam memorial, with its 50,000 names), and ten percent focus on soldiers killed in action. Nearly that many tell about (not surprisingly) mothers and their soldier sons. Only one - Barry Sadler's Vietnam-era "Salute to the Nurses" - has to do with women in the military, although women have served with distinction in the armed services from World War I onward. Finally, fewer than ten percent of the songs have been written or sung by women, even though since the late 1950s women have become ever more prominent in country music.

And now to some specific songs. Since World War II produced the most songs, I begin there. Virtually all of them - like Red Foley's grandiose "Smoke on the Water" - were unabashedly patriotic, but not moreso than the culture or popular music in general. Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, Belleau Wood, Sicily, Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito all have their songs, as do the millions of U.S. soldiers from countless small and large towns. The most popular song of them all was released only three months after Pearl Harbor. It sold 1.5 million records, and nearly that much in sheet music. Recorded by many singers, it told of a crippled mountain boy who yearned to serve Uncle Sam and thus gain a place on the roster of war heroes. Here is Elton Britt's "There's a Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere". One of the most interesting World War II songs is about a U.S. soldier who falls in love with a Filipino woman. Listen to a bit of Cowboy Copas's "Filipino Baby" of 1946, a cross-racial union at a time when such unions were widely proscribed in U.S. society. Coming as it did fifteen months before President Truman barred discrimination in the military, the song seemed a hopeful sign of some easing of racial tensions. In any case, people loved it; it rose to #2 on the charts, and was recorded several more times, as late as 1958.

Ah, but the story is more complicated than that. I learned recently that the song came not out of World War II but out of the Spanish American War. It was written by Charles K. Harris's in 1898, and in the original song - unlike the version I played for you - it is a "colored sailor lad" ("as black as black can be") who asks his white shipmates to look at "my gal's photograph." When they do, they laugh at him (and at her, who is also black). Undaunted, he tells them "There's no yaller gal that's dearer / Though her face is black as jet." On balance, it appears, the condescending tolerance expressed for the cross-racial relationship in the World War II song renders it somewhat less overtly racist than Harris's rather minstrel-like original.

How many "Filipino babies" received the attention of American military men during the Spanish-American War we do not know, but Stanley Karnow's book In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines reports that in the early 1930s even General Douglas McArthur himself (then in his fifties) maintained a sultry, long-term romantic relationship with a gorgeous twenty-something Filipina named Isabel Rosario Cooper. He called her "Dimples," and his purple-tinged correspondence with her is still closely guarded by his estate.

Whatever the hue of the lovers, wartime always intensifies the usual vicissitudes of romantic and family relationships. Fully a quarter of the songs I found focus to some degree upon relationships between sweethearts, sons and mothers, and wives and husbands. In the early days of country music, North Carolina's irrepressible Charlie Poole recorded the sweetly evocative "Goodbye, Mary Dear," about a girl who gives her departing soldier boy an autumn leaf to remember her by. "I'll be there, Mary dear, I'll be there," he reassures her,

When the fragrance of the roses fills the air 'Neath the oak tree grand and tall, when the leaves begin to fall I'll be there, I'll be there, sweet Mary dear.

But alas, she dies before his return:

It was autumn time again as he wandered down the lane There beneath the old oak tree he found a grave As he knelt in silent prayer, for the one he loved slept there And the tears fell on the golden leaf she gave.

In many songs, lovers push against the cruel uncertainty of war with last-minute pledges of fidelity. One recalls Gene Autry's "I'll Be True While You're Gone," Ernest Tubb's "Rainbow at Midnight," Patsy Montana's "Goodnight, Soldier," and Floyd Tillman's "Each Night at Nine." Wiley Walker and Gene Sullivan's "When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again" of November 1944 poignantly evoked the sweet sadness of parting and longed-for but by no means certain return. For nearly six decades now, it has continued to ring true for thousands of sweethearts who have kissed lingeringly and parted by troop trains, ships, and airplanes. It charted again as recently as 1985.

For the most part, of course, the mothers and sweethearts themselves stay at home, put letters in the mailbox and a "Gold Star in the Window," pray that they will not have to claim a casket and a flag, and worry about the attractiveness of foreign women to lonely men: the frauleins and Filipino babies, the geisha girls and (as in Tom T. Hall's 1973 song) the "Girls in Saigon City."

The men, for their part, worry about their lonely women at home, and hope that "At Mail Call Today" (Gene Autry's World War II song) they don't get their own "Dear John Letter." As Jean Shepard sang during the Korean war, "Dear John, oh how I hate to write . . . ." In perhaps the saddest example of all, Ernest Tubb's "Missing in Action" of 1952, an American soldier reported to his wife as MIA escapes from prison in Korea and makes his way home to the house he had built for them together, only to discover on the table a wedding picture of her and her new husband. In a selfless final gesture, he slips away so as not to disturb her newfound happiness.

Within the large frame of war itself, rather than the small one of personal relationships, the predominant affective and behavioral paradigm is male: unalloyed patriotism, a determined mood, and courage are the norm. From Johnny Horton's songs about John Paul Jones and Johnny Reb all the way to George Jones's hymn to "The Last Fallen Hero" at the World Trade Center, the bulk of the music both celebrates the heroism and resolution of American soldiers and implies that there are -- and should be -- no exceptions to it. Although in heartfelt letters to mothers, sweethearts and wives the men detail their memories of life before the war, their longing for home, and above all their wishes that this awful war might be over, virtually all at last come down on the manly side of duty, of getting the job done no matter what.

But the norm is not inviolable, and a few songs question it. Not surprisingly, given other norms of the culture, some of the questioning has been channeled through songs about mothers' grief at the death of their sons in battle. In most such songs, mothers affirm their sons' patriotism and accept their loss. But in a few there is an edge of anger, of having perhaps been betrayed by the state. In one wonderful song, a mother stands quietly in the snow outside a little railway station, maybe somewhere in the hills of West Virginia, waiting for the coffin of her soldier son to arrive. As you listen, I urge you to lay aside momentarily the bel canto and smooth pop norms of vocal performance we have all imbibed from the culture we share. Allow yourself to hear this song as a superb example of the ability of an extraordinary performer to infuse a sentimental image with beauty and power and meaning. In one of the great performances in country music, Molly O'Day sings "Teardrops Falling in the Snow" (1949).

Whatever protest may lurk here is obviously muted by the promise of a heavenly reunion between mother and son. This emotional and political tactic of displacement, of taking diversionary refuge in familiar clich©is as common in country music as it is in the culture generally. But only slightly below the surface, it may be, lie bitterness and a sense of waste and betrayal. O'Day joins her great natural voice to the keening and wailing that pour uncontrolled and uncontrollably from the depths of the devastated souls of women everywhere as they gaze upon the final contradictions of war in the final, cruellest act of the state.

Perhaps the most extended and overt protest against war to be found anywhere in country music is former Vietnam helicopter pilot Kris Kristofferson's 1989 concept CD, Third World Warrior. Its ten songs anatomize U.S. military misadventures in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and the greed, ideological rigidity, and arrogance that drove them. "I've just got to wonder," one song says,

what my daddy would have done If he'd seen the way they turned this dream around. I've got to go by what he told me, Try to tell the truth and stand your ground. Don't let the bastards get you down. But the anti-war country song I want to play part of for you here, is of a very different sort. Like only a few other war songs in country music (Tom T. Hall's "Salute to a Switchblade," for example), it frames its protest in humor. This song is by one of the most improbable country singers there has ever been, Kinky Friedman. The insistently but quirkishly self-reflexive Jewish son of a World War II veteran University of Texas professor, Friedman in the 1970s took a cue from the great western swing artist Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, and named his inimitable band Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. "A country band with a social conscience," he called it, "a demented love child of Lenny Bruce and Bob Wills." Rolling Stone called one of his albums "a true delight for those who like to two-step while committing sacrilege." I would love to play for you such Kinky Friedman classics as "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore," but we have to keep to our subject. So I've chosen his wonderful "We Reserve the Right [to Refuse Service to You]". And now to turn the question around: how has country music responded to wartime protesters and their protests, whether expressed in song or otherwise? On the whole, with somewhat strident antipathy. What one might call the protest "answer songs" cluster around the Vietnam War. The best known of them is of course Merle Haggard's "The Fightin' Side of Me": If you don't love it, leave it Let this song I'm singin' be a warnin'. If you're runnin' down my country, man, You're walkin' on the fightin' side of me. But there are a fair number of other anti-protest(er) songs: Johnny Cash's "This Ain't No Rag, It's a Flag," Stonewall Jackson's "The Minute Men Are Turning in Their Graves," and Dave Dudley's "Vietnam Blues," the latter written by a not-yet-radicalized Kristofferson more than twenty years before his Reagan-era protest album. More interesting to me than those songs that are clearly either for or against war are others that explore some of the domestic social contradictions of America's experience in and with war. My title song, "Forgotten Soldier Boy," recorded by the Monroe Brothers in 1936, is about some World War I veterans who, promised a federal bonus and then denied it, formed themselves into the "Bonus Expeditionary Force" and marched on Washington in May 1932. They were met there by U.S. troops commanded by Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur and his second in command, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Both MacArthur and President Hoover believed the marchers were led by dangerous communists. After a few weeks' standoff, MacArthur (perhaps somewhat distracted by Dimples) led his troops in driving the veterans out and destroying their camps. So far as I know, "Forgotten Soldier Boy" is the only song the Monroe Brothers ever recorded with political content or theme. As you listen, note that the marchers both protest and maintain their patriotism. More directly critical of the social and political contradictions than either of these songs is "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," recorded by Johnny Cash in 1964, as the number of American troops in Vietnam steadily rose. Ira Hayes was a Pima Indian who just after his twenty-second birthday helped five other soldiers raise the American flag on Iwo Jima - an act immortalized in one of the most famous of all World War II photographs and in Bob Wills's country hit of 1945, "Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima." Shortly after the heroic event, Hayes, who had hardly ever been off the reservation before he enlisted, was brought back to the U.S. to help with one of President Roosevelt's bond drives. Disliking the public adulation, he returned to the reservation, tried to stay out of public view, and then took refuge increasingly in drink. He died drunk in Arizona shortly after his thirty-second birthday. Besides telling Hayes's story, the song (which surprisingly went to number three on the charts) engages the historic social injustices that drove a poor Indian boy - like poor boys elsewhere - to seek opportunities in the military not available outside. Today I will play a version of the song by Hazel Dickens, whose growing up in the bombed out and poverty-stricken coalfields of West Virginia affords her a keen understanding of the pain and suffering of an Ira Hayes. Her vocal style and power as a performer are quite reminiscent of Molly O'Day. Several related songs, instead of focusing on social injustice, explore the lasting inner trauma experienced by Vietnam vets. In mid-1967, with more than 400,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, the war going very badly, and more than 30,000 already killed and wounded, Mel Tillis wrote "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town." It is about a paraplegic veteran's frustration, sadness, embarrassment and anger. Here is a performance of it by Bluegrass greats Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. A related song is Charlie Daniels's "Still in Saigon," in which a Vietnam vet is trapped in relentless memories of the war, and the confusion and paranoia that issue from them. Coming from Daniels, whose politics are conservative to say the least, it is quite a surprising offering. To bring our little story to the present, I conclude with two recent songs, both composed in the wake of 9/11, and both of which have generated intense discussion in the media. The first is Toby Keith's jingoistic "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue," which has the Statue of Liberty shaking her fist over the "sucker punch" that took out the World Trade Center towers. Even though Keith's album debuted at #1, not everyone was pleased with the song. Peter Jennings scheduled and then unscheduled it for performance on his Fourth of July TV special. But then CNN invited Keith to perform part of it for them, and since then it has been played countless times on country radio. Steve Earle's "John Walker's Blues," on the other hand, has been almost completely denied a hearing on country radio. It is about John Walker Lindh, the northern California boy who went to fight with the Taliban. AP writer Jim Patterson reported that when the song was released, "Nashville talk-radio hosts claimed [Earle] had written [it] to shock the public and kick-start a flagging musical career." The New York Post headlined its story ''Twisted Ballad Honors Tali-Rat." Nashville DJ Phil Valentine called the song "politically insane." Well, now. It seems odd to me that in a country in which Lt. Calley and Ollie North were so easily morphed into heroes, and in which hundreds of U.S. mercenaries fought alongside anti-democratic Contra troops in Nicaragua with the U.S. government's patently illegal backing, so much political hysteria should have arisen concerning a single confused twenty-one year-old infatuated with Islam. But so it happened. Listen and see what you think. Speaking about the song, Earle said that "I'm trying to make clear that wherever he got to, [Lindh] didn't arrive there in a vacuum." To have been raised on MTV was to be, in William Carlos Williams's phrase, a "pure product of the culture." And as for having written the song, Earle said, ''No intelligent person questions my right to do this. . . . I think my audience does respect my right to what I believe, and they will allow me that voice.'' Maybe, but that voice will not be heard on radio. So here we have it, the ends of the spectrum of current country songs on war: Toby Keith's boot in your ass, or Steve Earle's "John Walker's Blues." Fortunately, it isn't up to country music to resolve our social and political contradictions for us. No music bears such a responsibility. All one may fairly ask of any popular musical form is that it reflect with reasonable scope and fidelity at least some of the complexities and subtleties of the social, cultural, and political topics and issues it chooses to engage -- if indeed it engages any. I hope that our brief attention to a few songs demonstrates that with regard to war, country music has done that, and continues to do it. In 1950, folk singer Ed McCurdy penned what turned out to be his most famous song, "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream." Many people recorded it, but no country singer ever had until Johnny Cash: Last night I dreamed the strangest dream I'd ever dreamed before I dreamed the world had all agreed To put an end to war. Lord knows we are not anywhere near there yet, but no doubt Steve Earle would join with Nancy Griffith when she sings "From a distance, you look like my friend, / Even though we are at war." It is my fervent hope that our current inclination to view war as such an irresistible instrument of policy will soon abate, and our national blue moon will turn to gold again. This talk was presented in the Arts in the Time of War series at Duke. David Whisnant is a professor emeritus of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.