The Songs Go On

And speaking of Carly and James, here’s another tune they did. this from the fat book of American folk songs that goes from the aching ballads Steven Foster wrote to the rousing get-up-and-clap tunes done by George M. Cohan just as our young men were offering their meek necks to the meat grinder that was the first World War.  58,000 British troops went down, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme yet that war got remembered in merry tunes that made it sound as if we were sending our boys off to an ox-pull competition at the county fair:  “Over there, over there, Send the word send the word over there That we’ll be over, We’re comin’ over And we won’t be back till it’s over over there!”That’s George M. Cohan for you. Then there’s his super-nostalgic “Give My Regards to Broadway, Remember me to Herald Square, Tell all the gang at 42^nd street that I will soon be there. Whisper of how I’m yearning to Mingle with the Old-time Throng. Give my Regards to Old Broadway and Tell them I’ll be there ere long!”Well, some got back ere long. Some never got back at all. This handsome guy above was my grandmother's first cousin.  He was killed ‘over there’ just two months after his wedding day and two weeks before the Armistice. It took more than a year to bring home his body and now all that’s left of him is his name on a placard in a playground in Dorchester Massachusetts. His folks were right off the boat and yet he graduated from Williams College in 1898.  All that loss in a war!But enough of this sad talk. This song, also sung by James Taylor and Carly Simon, is part of the American songbook too. It was written probably 200 years ago as a lullaby but it’s sure been enlivened in our time by several recording artists. Nino Tempo and April Stevens did it when I was kid and here it is in the 70s, a jump-up-and-dance tune if there ever was one.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeOqD3uMIRs]