Music, Lyrics and Cultural Tropes in Australian Popular Songs of the First World War: Two Case Studies

Abstract

During the First World War, hundreds of songs were written in Australia to give expression to the nation's attitudes to the conflict. Very few of these songs became well known but two songs in particular, ‘Sing Us a Song of Australia’ (1916) and ‘For Auld Lang Syne: Australia Will be There’ (1915), achieved wide and, at times, spectacular success. This article examines the circumstances that led to the creation of the songs and the reasons—musical, social, cultural—that made them so well regarded and well known. The article argues that both works became emblematic for the nation for quite different reasons yet both relied to an extent on exploiting notions of nation, empire and masculinity for their success.

Acknowledgements

This article had its genesis in two seminar/conference presentations. The first presentation, ‘Australian Songs of War, 1914–1918’, was delivered at a research seminar in the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, Monash University, on 22 August 2013. The second presentation, ‘The Quest for an Emblematic Song of Australia’, formed part of a panel session entitled ‘Popular Music and the First World War’ at the annual conference of the Royal Musical Association held at the School of Advanced Studies, Institute of Musical Research, University of London on 19 September 2013. For help, guidance and advice in the Rare Books Collection at the Sir Louis Matheson Library at Monash University, I thank Richard Overell and Stephen Herrin. For comments and suggestions on various drafts of the presentations and this article, I thank Sarah Collins, Margaret Kartomi, Aline Scott-Maxwell, Anthea Skinner, Graeme Smith and John Whiteoak. I am also grateful to the two anonymous assessors for their comments and suggestions that helped shape the final version. Finally, I am indebted to Derek Scott, who first suggested undertaking research on popular music in Australia during the First World War that has formed the basis of this article, and to Mark Carroll for his help in bringing the article to publication.

Notes

¹ For a brief background to the history of ‘Advance Australia Fair’, see Georgina Binns, ‘Patriotic and Nationalist Song in Australia to 1919: A Study of the Popular Sheet Music Genre’, 2 vols. (Master of Music Thesis, University of Melbourne, 1988), 24–7.

² From a letter from McCormick to R.B. Fuller, 1 August 1913, National Library of Australia MS1347 cited in Binns, ‘Patriotic and Nationalist Song’, 27.

³ See, for example, J. McIntosh, ‘Australia's Battle Hymn’, 11th ed. (Melbourne: Atlas Press, 1914).

⁴ Skipper Francis, ‘For Auld Lang Syne! Australia Will be There’, 42nd ed. (Melbourne: Dinsdale's Pty Ltd, 1915); and Chas Ridgway, ‘Sing Us a Song of Australia’, 5th ed. (Melbourne: Dinsdale's Pty Ltd, 1916). The dates of songs cited in this article are often approximate and I have relied on the catalogues of the National Library of Australia and the Sir Louis Matheson Library at Monash University for verification. Moreover, many songs of the period claim to be a second or much later edition (e.g., there is an 82nd edition of ‘For Auld Lang Syne! Australia Will be There’) but more often than not there are no surviving earlier editions. It may be that ‘editions’ refers to the numbers of 1000s of copies sold or, less likely, that edition numbers were invented for the sake of exaggerating sales (I am grateful to Stephen Herrin, from the Rare Books Collection, Sir Matheson Louis Library, Monash University, for discussions on this topic on 24 January 2014.) A detailed bibliographic study of popular songs of the period is urgently required in order to update, correct and expand Kenneth Snell's Australian Popular Music Composer Index (East Bentleigh: Quick Trick Press, 1991), which will make it possible to verify the existence, publication patterns, mode of distribution and claims of best-seller status and previous published editions. A history of publishing in this period is Stephen Herrin, ‘Printers and Printing in Australia to the Early Twentieth Century: Personal and Business Pursuits’ (PhD thesis, Monash University 2004). See also Jennifer Hill, ‘Aspects of Australian Published Song, 1890–1914’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2002).

⁵ Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1. Another book that followed shortly after this was Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites (eds.), European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

⁶ Jay Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, 3 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Volume 1 is entitled ‘Global War’, Volume 2 ‘The State’ and Volume 3 ‘Civil Society’. Two chapters potentially touch on music and both are in Volume 3: Nicolas Beaupre, ‘Soldier-writers and Poets’; and Annette Becker, ‘Arts’. Winter is the author of a chapter, but it deals only briefly with music; Jay Winter, ‘Popular Culture in Wartime Britain’, in Roshwald and Stites (eds.), European Culture in the Great War, 330–48.

⁷ Karen Arrandale, ‘Artists’ Rifles and Artistic Licence: Edward Dent's War’, First World War Studies 2/1 (2011), 7–16; Lewis Foreman, ‘In Ruhleben Camp’, 27–40; Kate Kennedy, ‘Ambivalent Englishness: Ivor Gurney's Song Cycle, Ludlow and Teme’, 41–64; Rachel Cowgill, ‘Canonizing Remembrance: Music for Armistice Day at the BBC, 1922–27’, First World War Studies 2/1 (2011), 75–107; and Alison Hennegan, ‘”Fit for Heroes”: Bliss, Britten and Requiems’, First World War Studies 2/1 (2011), 109–19.

⁸ Glenn Watkins, Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

⁹ Brian Murdoch, Fighting Songs and Warring Words: Popular Lyrics of the Word Wars (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). He writes: ‘The enormous ANZAC losses at the Dardanelles (and the strategic inadequacies that caused those losses) are treated with a justified bitterness’ (Murdoch, Fighting Songs and Warring Words, 81).

¹⁰ John Major, My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall (London: Harper Press, 2012), 319–28.

¹¹ F.S. Kelly, ‘Sonata in G Major for Pianoforte and Violin’, facs ed. (National Library of Australia). Tate wrote a large number of works about the war and is the subject of research in progress by Dr Christine Mercer. For a comprehensive account of Tate's music and career, see Christine Mercer, ‘Henry Tate (1873–1926): His Pursuit of an Australian Musical identity’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2010).

¹² On Agnew's planned Anzac symphony, see Emily Moresby, Australia Makes Music (Melbourne: Longman, 1948), 132 cited in Rhoderick McNeill, ‘The Australian Symphony in the 1950s’, paper presented to the Faculty of Arts Research Forum, University of Southern Queensland, 10 March 2004, 16 (Accessed 23 January 2014), www.usq.edu.au/resources/australiansymphoniesofthe1950s.pdf. On F.S. Kelly see Race Against Time: The Diaries of F.S. Kelly, ed. Thérèse Radic (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2004). I am grateful to Edward Antonov for conversations about his current research into Kelly's Gallipoli Sonata for violin. The Agnew piece is in a private collection and access to it is currently being sought. Alfred Hill, ‘Anzac Day’ (Sydney: Chappell & Co., 1932).

¹³ Binns, ‘Patriotic and Nationalist Song in Australia’.

¹⁴ Jennifer Hill, ‘Aspects of Australian Published Song’, 1890–1914, 2 vols. (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2002).

¹⁵ John Whiteoak, ‘Popular Music, Militarism, Women, and the Early “Brass Band” in Australia’, Australasian Music Research 6 (2001), 27–48; John Whiteoak, ‘“Pity the Bandless Towns”: Brass Banding in Australian Rural Communities before World War Two’, Rural Society 13/3 (2003), 287–310; and Roland Bannister, ‘Gender, Change and Military Music in the Australian Anzac Tradition: A Critical Perspective’, Context: Journal of Music Research 14 (1997), 5–14.

¹⁶ Graham Seal, Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2004), 47–62; and Amanda Laugesen, ‘Boredom is the Enemy’: The Intellectual and Imaginative Lives of Australian Soldiers in the Great War and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 79–104.

¹⁷ See, for example, Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980 (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1981); John Robertson, Anzac and Empire: The Tragedy and Glory of Gallipoli (Port Melbourne: Hamlyn, 1990); and John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Longman, 1996).

¹⁸ Indicative literature of the period illustrating these concepts include Henry Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1883); Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1894); Henry Drummond, The Lowell Lectures on the Ascent of Man (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1894); A.J. Balfour, The Foundations of Belief, Being Notes Introductory to the Study of Theology (London, New York and Bombay: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895); and Robert Macintosh, From Comte to Benjamin Kidd: The Appeal to Biology of Evolution for Human Guidance (London: Macmillan and Co., 1899). For a good overview of the historical importance of these tropes: D.P. Crook, Benjamin Kidd: Portrait of a Social Darwinist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and John Hedley Brooke, ‘Darwin and Victorian Christianity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, ed. Jonathon Hodge and Gregory Radick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 192–213, see esp. 202–7.

¹⁹ See particularly Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990); John Shepherd, Music as Social Text (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); David Brackett, Interpreting Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and John Covach, ‘Popular Music, Unpopular Musicology’, in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 452–70.

²⁰ Joy Damousi, ‘War and Commemoration: “The Respectability of Empire”’, in Australia's Empire, ed. Deryck M. Schreuder and Stuart Ward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 288–311. Other sources that deal with Australian–British relations and identity in the period include: Robertson, Anzac and Empire; Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History; Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, 3rd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chapter 7; and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds with Mark McKenna and Joy Damousi, What's Wrong with Anzac?: The Militarisation of Australian History (Sydney: New South, 2010).

²¹ Damousi, ‘War and Commemoration’, 289.

²² Correspondence from John Monash to his cousin G. Monash, 19 October 1914 cited in Geoffrey Serle, John Monash: A Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 1982), 202.

²³ For detail on the movement, see Brian Elliot (ed.), The Jindyworobaks (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1979).

²⁴ Binns, ‘Patriotic and Nationalist Song in Australia’, 35–6.

²⁵ For literature on songs that soldiers sung, and their wider musical interests and activities, see Seal, Inventing Anzac, 47–62; and Laugesen, 'Boredom is the Enemy', 79–104.

²⁶ Murdoch, Fighting Songs, 77–8 makes the same point in relation to songs sung by soldiers: ‘The songs by soldiers fall into a number of categories: they could be patriotic, not in the general sense of stressing a concept of nation, but at least of asserting the superiority of their forces over the enemy; they could be sentimental, looking back to the homeland; perhaps most important, they could relieve feelings either by verbal attacks on immediate superiors, or on the conditions under which they lived’.

²⁷ Alfred Mansfield, ‘Wake up! Australia: An Appeal from the Trenches’ (Melbourne: Dinsdale's Pty Ltd, 1916).

²⁸ This situation was commonplace in the period. For example, Paul A. Rubens' ‘Your King and Country Wants You’ (Melbourne: Chappell & Co. Ltd, 1914) was sung across the colonies; indeed this song was the ‘Colonial edition’ and, despite being printed by Chappell and Co. in Melbourne, no attempt was made to localize the lyrics: the placenames of Falmouth (Cornwall) and Forth (South Lancashire, Scotland) were retained.

²⁹ The location and date of the concert are not given in the sheet music edition, but it could have been at the Royal Colonial Institute because there is mention of Crossley's association with it in ‘Australian War Contingent Association’, Sunday Times (Sydney) (22 November 1914), 10.

³⁰ See further and, more generally, Waterhouse, ‘Australian Legends: Representations of the Bush, 1813–1913’, Australian Historical Studies 31/115 (2000), 201–21.

³¹ Andrew MacCunn, ‘Good Bye and Good Luck’ (Sydney: Albert and Son, c. 1916).

³² V.J. Carroll, ‘Claude Eric Fergusson McKay (1878–1972)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Accessed 18 June 2103), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mckay-claude-eric-fergusson-10975. All references to McKay in this paragraph are from this source.

³³ Martha Rutledge, ‘Christine Dorothy (Dot) Brunton’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Accessed 18 June 2013), http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/brunton-christine-dorothy-dot-9608.

³⁴Ibid.

³⁵ Reg. A.A. Stoneham, ‘Back Home’ (Melbourne: Loebel & Co., c. 1915).

³⁶The Macquarie Concise Dictionary (Sydney: The Macquarie Library, 1998).

³⁷ Richard White, ‘Cooees Across the Strand: Australian Travellers in London and the Performance of National Identity’, Australian Historical Studies 32 (2001), 109. White discusses briefly one particular coo-ee song writer, Maude Wardsworth (‘Cooees Across the Strand’, 122). ‘Coo-ee’ was also exploited as the name for a group of concert-party entertainers during the war; see Laugesen, ‘Boredom is the Enemy’, 83–6.

³⁸ John Dunmore Lang, Phillipsland; or the Country Hitherto Designated Port Phillip: Its Present Condition and Prospects, as a Highly Eligible Field for Emigration (London: Longman Brown Green & Longmans, 1847), 85, cited in White, ‘Cooees Across the Strand’, 113.

³⁹ White, ‘Cooees Across the Strand’, 112.

⁴⁰ Annie Gill (arr. Bert Rache), ‘Australia's Sons and Daughters’ (Sydney: W. Shackleton, 1918); J.H. Hill, ‘Uphold Australia's Name’ (Melbourne: Dinsdale's Pty Ltd, 1917); and Chas Ridgway, ‘Sing Us a Song of Australia’, 5th ed. (Melbourne: Dinsdale's Pty Ltd, c. 1917).

⁴¹ Skipper Francis, ‘For Auld Lang Syne! Australia will be There’, 42nd ed. (Melbourne: Dinsdale's, 1915), 2.

⁴² One other song that achieved significant success, reaching fifty editions, was Augustus W. Juncker's ‘I was Dreaming’ published in the 1890s. See Hill, ‘Aspects of Australian Published Song’, 6 and 41; and Jennifer Hill, ‘From Drawing Room to Diva: The Australian Popular Song “I was Dreaming” by Augustus W. Juncker’, Australasian Music Research 4 (1999), 59–78.

⁴³ For a succinct account of the social and musical contexts of La Marseillaise, see David Cairns, ‘The Reluctant Conservative’, Berlioz Society Bulletin 191 (2013), 27–37.

⁴⁴ Cited in Damousi, ‘War and Commemoration’, 298–9.

⁴⁵ The literature on social Darwinism, masculinity and the survival of the fittest is enormous and encompasses a range of scholarship. For late-nineteenth-century interpretations and adaptations of the need for physical exercise as a pursuit of higher races and for British well-being, see Charles Kingsley, Health and Education (London: Ludgate Hill, 1874); and for a discussion of the importance of the cultivation of manhood for education and for war, see Matthias Roth, ‘On the Neglect of Physical Education and Hygiene by Parliament and the Education Department: As the principal causes of the degeneration of the physique of the population, of the excessive infantile & general mortality, and of many diseases &c’ (London, 1879). Twentieth-century studies of the influence of Darwinism and related thought is voluminous but three particular generalist studies give comprehensive backgrounds to key issues: D.R. Oldroyd, Darwinian Impacts: An Introduction to the Darwinian Revolution, 2nd ed. (Kensington, NSW: New South Wales University Press, 1988); more recently, Stephen Jay Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Rebecca Stott, Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution (New York: Random House, 2012).

⁴⁶ Richard White, Inventing Australia, 125. See further Kate Murphy, ‘The “Most Dependable Element of Any Country's Manhood”,’ History Australia 5/3 (2008), 72.1–20.

⁴⁷ Correspondence from Lord Kitchener to Sir Joseph Ward, 2 March 1910, Public Record Office, London 30/57/39 TT14, cited in Robertson, The Tragedy and Glory of Gallipoli, 12.

⁴⁸ Correspondence from Hamilton to his wife, 6 April 1914, Hamilton Papers, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's College, London, cited in Robertson, The Tragedy and Glory of Gallipoli, 14.

⁴⁹Sydney Morning Herald (22 June 1907), 6, cited in White, Inventing Australia, 126. See also Waterhouse, ‘Australian legends’, 221.

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Paul Watt

Paul Watt is a lecturer in music and research coordinator in the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, Monash University. He is the author of articles on a range of topics published in the RMA Research Chronicle, Nineteenth-Century Music Review and Music & Letters. With Patrick Spedding he is editor of Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period (2011), and with Anne-Marie Forbes is editor of Joseph Holbrooke: Critic, Composer and Musical Patriot (forthcoming in late 2014). Paul is currently working on Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography and a monograph on the professionalization of music criticism in nineteenth-century England, the research for which is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award. Email: [email protected]