International: Blues

The people had never stopped singing. They had found songs to lead them, like defiant banners, into battle; they had sung on the way to concentration camps and gas chambers. By war’s end, their chorus had thinned; the hungry have no songs and the dead no voices. But amid festering despair and slowly healing hope, many still sang—some to forget and some to remember, and some because they did not want to be alone with silence. Despite counterpoints of desperately wanted gaiety, what they sang in 1946 was mostly blues.

The Red Lantern. In bombed, defeated Tokyo, five dinner-jacketed musicians in a sweltering dance hall last week struggled through I Can’t Begin to Tell You. The saxophone wavered, the drums came in too strong; couples danced slowly and solemnly.

In Geisha houses, brightly kimonoed girls plucked their banjo-like samisen and trilled sentimental Japanese favorites like the Rain Blues, the Song of Beauty, the Innocence Duet. When a boisterous American asked for the Japanese national anthem, the girls refused but obliged with You Are My Sunshine. Toshiko Yamaguchi, once one of Japan’s most popular singers, came home from a Shanghai internment camp with a new repertoire that included Star Dust.

In an unpainted clapboard shack in Tokyo’s gutted east end, a middle-aged Japanese laborer sat on the floor with his family and, in tune with his three-tube radio, hummed the Atami Blues*:

Suddenly I met my old flame

And we went walking—along Nishiki Ura . . .

I want to forget the old dreams

But still embrace you. . . .

In bombed, defeated Berlin, the most popular songstress was blonde Edith Morell, one of the first Jewish entertainers to make a postwar hit. Her audience, which had followed her from the Femina Club to the Kabarett der Komiker, heard her intone: “Come back, come back, I am waiting for you, for you are my happiness” and “Under the red lantern of St. Pauli [in Hamburg’s famed red-light district] my girl stands waiting for me.”

Almost every night some drunken American would insist that the band play the Nazis’ Horst Wessel Lied. Reluctantly the musicians complied, hurrying the beat to get it over with, while the German customers stared morosely into their beers.

In comfortably furnished apartments or in damp cellars, Germans clustered around their phonographs and danced to U.S. jazz which the Nazis had banned. Their favorite was a trilingual G.I. jingle, Get Up Them Stairs, Mademoiselle. It consolingly reminded the Germans that the French, too, had experienced U.S. “occupation.”

The Red Skirt. In Vienna, a new ballad, Music from Vienna, wailed an appeal to the slender ghosts of Schubert and Strauss:

Twentieth Century! It has no time

For Romance or Happiness. . . .

Rubble, ruin, misery and murder,

Amid which a howling jazz shrieks in dissonance,

Where can all this lead poor, proud Vienna?

The people tried their best to sing Vienna’s lustige Lieder (jolly songs), but it was not easy. A current favorite revival was “In the Prater the trees bloom again,” but few Viennese could sing it without remembering that their Prater amusement park was a mass of charred plaster and twisted steel.

Czechoslovakia’s Communist Ministry of Information frowned on the triumphant march of U.S. syncopation. It encouraged the old, well-loved Czech folk songs (“My sweetheart is drawing wine at the tavern, but I did not come for wine but for love”).

At Prague’s Manes Kaverna last week, the people sat for hours over a cup of ersatz coffee until night came, and the red, blue and green lights strung in the poplars were turned on; a 15-piece band, trim in white linen jackets (though some musicians omitted neckties), fiddled nostalgia. Prague’s current favorite, which was banned during the war as Red propaganda :

I had a little red skirt when I was a schoolgirl

And now I have one just like it.

Tonight, dearest, when you come I shall wear

My little red skirt, my favorite skirt,

In the hope that our love will never fade.

Prague’s younger set, unaffected by sentimentality and Communism’s cultural ukase, gloried in an importation from the U.S. In its shabby, torn shirts and shorts, Prague’s postwar generation strutted through Hubba, hubba, hubba.

Clementine & Alice. Moscow was a little behind the times. Soviet teen-agers were still busy with Chattanooga Choo-choo and Coming in on a Wing and a Prayer. Russia’s strangest importation from the West was the U.S. Marines’ Hymn, sung to the tune of Clementine (which might give the Russians a dangerously erroneous idea of the Leathernecks). Latest favorite: the American Soldier’s Song, which most Russians believe is constantly crooned by G.I.s; it is a speeded up version of There Is a Tavern in the Town, in which the tavern has become the scene of tender leave-taking between a girl and a soldier.

Russia, however, has one of the few really moving lyrics of the postwar world:

Dark night has laid itself between us on the black steppe

Only bullets are whistling . . .

Oh my beloved, I know you are not sleeping

But sitting near the cradle

And silently blotting a tear . . .

I trust you, my dear beloved,

And this faith saves me from the dark

And from the bullets.

I am content because I know you will wait for me,

Whatever my wounds may be.

The French, in their own somewhat cautious fashion, sang as usual of love: “Tonight is ours, if you wish,” Paris hummed, adding thriftily: “One night is a lot, and yet so little.”

The British were sunk in sentimentality and longing for the good old days that never were. At London’s Mall concerts, the bands throbbed Rose-Marie, Alice Blue Gown and Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life. In nightclubs, heavily curtained against outside noise and austerity, singers crooned: She Had to Go and Lose It at the Astor and Money Is the Root of All Evil.*

By & large, the U.S. seemed to have written the songs of the peace, if not its laws.

*Atami is a resort town near Yokohama where, according to Terry’s Guide to the Japanese Empire, “certain of the spots are so extraordinarily romantic that they lure one to suicide.”

*A misquotation, as J. P. Morgan meaningfully pointed out to.his partner Thomas W. Lamont in 1936 when Lamont made a slip before the Nye Investigation Committee. The correct quote: “The love of money is the root of all evil” (I Timothy 6:10).