Singing has long been part of military life, and the U.S. Army wanted to keep this heritage alive as it mobilized and trained more than eight million soldiers to fight in Europe and the Pacific. The army believed that group singing was important for “morale building through soldier participation” and “emotional stability through self-entertainment,” explained Captain M. Claude Rosenberry, who helped set up the army music program.
Wanting things done its way, the army adopted a regimented approach to music. In 1941, it published its official Army Song Book, containing 67 patriotic, folk, and service songs like “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful,” and “Pop! Goes the Weasel,” and it expected soldiers to learn all 67 songs. The Quartermaster Corps even wrapped pamphlets of religious tunes around rations to make sure wholesome material reached the front. The army organized officially sanctioned sing-alongs and envisioned every platoon with a barbershop quartet and a “camp-fire instrumentalist (guitar, ukulele, etc.)” and each company with a song leader and “accordionist,” Captain Rosenberry wrote.
These by-the-book efforts fell flat. The army could tell men what to do, but G.I.s dug in their heels at being told what to sing and when to sing it. Soldiers, a New York Herald Tribune editorial noted, “follow only one rule in their choice of songs. They do not sing what is expected of them by their elders.” They snubbed army-organized song sessions, too. Their attitude was “spontaneous or nothing,” noted Sergeant Mack Morriss, a South Pacific correspondent for Yank magazine.
In place of songs with the army’s imprimatur, the men invented their own, making up countless verses for current hits, patriotic anthems, and well-known folk songs. Their improvised lyrics, or parodies, were often sarcastic, sometimes bawdy but always brutally honest. Their verses stretched the limits of poetic license and sometimes obliterated the boundaries of good taste, but they carried a power professional songwriters would envy and provide a glimpse, available nowhere else, into what it
