[78-L] The debut broadcast of God Bless America

[Michael Biel]

On 8/21/2011 12:36 PM, Cary Ginell wrote:
> Berlin always had a desire to write a great "peace song," but it was difficult for him, as he told a journalist, "because you have trouble dramatizing peace. It's easy to dramatize war."

If he told that to a journalist he lied to him because he is 
conveniently forgetting that he wrote "Stay Down Here Where You Belong" 
which is VERY clearly an anti-war song.
>
> Berlin's biography shows that Kate Smith sang the song on Armistice Day, November 11, but Biel states that the broadcast was the day before, November 10. What documentation is there of this?

It's called a calender.  Kate's program was aired on Thursdays at that 
point.  Nov 11 1938 was a Friday.


>
> When the song was performed on Memorial Day, 1939 at Ebbets Field during a Brooklyn Dodgers game, the audience rose and removed their hats, as they would for the national anthem.

She had been closing EVERY broadcast with it.  Surely her studio 
audiences were not standing.  Britian was not yet at war, and the U.S. 
was still isolationist, with Charles Lindbergh and Bund rallies 
reminding us of WW I.  They might have been standing for different 
reasons than they would a while later.

> Kate Smith famously sang it at the New York World's Fair, resulting in the sheet music selling over 400,000 copies, with royalties exceeding $40,000. Both Republicans and Democrats besieged Berlin to gain permission to use the song at their respective political conventions in 1940. Though Berlin was a Republican, he couldn't go against FDR, a sitting Democrat, and granted permission to both parties.
At least they (apparently) asked permission.  Today they just steal the 
songs.
>
>
>
> When he originally wrote the song for his World War I show "Yip, Yip, Yaphank," there were two objections to it. One was the aforementioned flood of patriotic songs coming out at the time; the other was the fact that the song would be deemed "too solemn" and "sticky" for the acerbic WWI doughboys.   Cary Ginell


From: uncledavelewis at hotmail.com
>> "God Bless America" was originally composed around 1916-early 1917,


Wasn't "Yip Yip Yankhank written in 1918, after we got into the war?

>>   but one of Berlin's colleagues
>> suggested that the market was flooded with patriotic songs of various kinds, and in this time period, the colleague would have been right.


In that earlier time period the flood of patriotic songs had not yet hit 
in the U.S.  "America I Love You" is practically the only song of that 
type that came out in 1916.  That was the era of "I Didn't Raise My Boy 
To Be A Soldier" and Berlin's aforementioned song.  That fable makes 
more sense for 1918.

>>   Berlin packed the tune away in a large steamer trunk he used
>> to store projects for future development or reuse;

C'mon, did he really use a steamer trunk???  That is such a cliche.

>>   the song that became "Blue Skies" spent some years in that filing system as well.

That song came out rather early.  Are you sure you don't mean "Easter 
Parade" which was slightly based on a few bars from "Smile and Show Your 
Dimples"?

>>   He didn't retrieve "God Bless America" for 20 years.
>>
>> The line "Let us all be grateful that we're far from there" is probably a leftover from the earlier form
>> of the song, and meant as a tip of the hat to Wilson's anti-intervention policies, which would have been
>> meaningless after April 1917.   Uncle Dave Lewis

Exactly why I think that this verse dates from 1938, not 1916.  The 
whole verse is essentially moot after Pearl Harbor as well  -- "While 
the storm clouds gather"

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com