Soldiers' Concert at Downton Abbey © Downton Online

Music has always been an expression not only of emotion, but of popular culture, and the outbreak of WWI was no small inspiration for the many songwriters, lyricists and musicians, as well as the soldiers themselves. Though patriotism and morale remained a key topic for songs throughout the war and beyond, they also revealed the particular mood of the time from which they derive. From the patriotic “Keep the Home Fires Burning” to the enthusiastic strains of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” to the satirical “Oh, What a Lovely War!”, soldiers in the trenches and the people waiting for them back home used music to shape and mold the reactions to the brutality and tragedy–and inspiration–of war.

In tonight’s episode of Downton Abbey, Mary, accompanied at the piano by her sister Edith, uses the sentimental song, “If You Were the Only Girl (In the World)” to subtle express her sorrow and longing for Matthew. Written in 1916 by Nat D. Ayer with lyrics by Clifford Grey, the song evidently became a very popular wartime tune, as it is referenced in quite a few books written during WWI:

Ninety-Six Hours’ Leave by Stephen McKenna

THE Semiramis orchestra was beginning to play a second encore, when the girl in the white dress appeared at the top of the steps. “If you were the only girl in the world and I were the only boy,” she hummed to herself, as she came down into the lounge. The orchestra was unaffectedly bored with the song; it had been played once at luncheon, twice at tea, and now this was the fourth time since seven o’clock. Prince Christoforo, however, did not share their boredom; it was at his request that they were giving the encore.

Suddenly the Prince left his seat and approached the girl in white.

“If you’re looking for a chair,” he said, “there are four unoccupied ones over there.”

The girl turned at sound of his voice, still gravely nodding time to the music.

“‘ If I were the only girl in the world . . .’”

“And I were the only boy,” he answered, with a smile.

“I should like to dance, only I suppose people would stare.”

Edith at the piano © Downton Online

The Queen of Psalissa by George A. Birmingham

The king’s faith was very touching; but Gorman still maintains that he was not far wrong about Mme. Ypsilante’s feelings. She might not actually have preferred Konrad Karl’s death; but it is certain that she did not want to see him married to Miss Donovan.

The king drew a last mouthful of smoke from his cigar and then flung the end of it into the sea.

“Gorman, what is it that one of your great English poets has so beautifully said? ‘If you were the only girl in the world, and I were the only boy!’—that is Corinne and me. ‘A garden of Eden just made for two ‘—that is Paris. I have always admired the English poets. It is so true, what they say!”

Way of Revelation:a Novel of Five Years by Wilfrid Ewart

Rosemary Meynell went across to the bureau, unlocked the small drawer as before, and took from it the Louis Quatorze snuff-box. This she handed to Upton.

“Thank you,” he said with a disagreeable smile; “but these little things aren’t given up quite so easily as all that, you know. However, if you want any more . . . pleased to oblige at any time!”

Silence followed, during which the girl gazed steadily in front of her with an expression of fine contempt. The meanness of the man’s soul had never revealed itself as now!

Upton began to hum the words of a popular revue air, tapping in time to it with his foot.

“If you were the only girl in the world
And I …”

“Well, the rest doesn’t matter,” he broke off. “You’re not, you see,”

The Things We Are by John Middleton Murry

He fed in a first floor tea-room full of Sunday couples who had reached the stage of sentimental silence. It was strange, he thought, how their attitudes ran to type. The man leaned back on the red plush seat that ran round the wall; the woman leaned her head on his shoulder. She was always on his right, and her right hand was always fingering his sleeve, his watch-chain or his coat lapel. Even the fair-haired man in pince-nez who was solemnly vamping out “If you were the only girl in the world” on the reluctant piano submitted to the ritual. A girl in pink, with a wad of black hair low down on her pasty neck, had flung her arm round his shoulder and was perched insecurely on all that remained of the stool.

Mary singing © Downton Online

There was even a gory adaptation of the song entitled “If you were the only Boche in the Trench”
Tune: “If you were the only Girl in the World.”

If you were the only Boche in the trench,
And I had the only bomb,
Nothing else would matter in the world that day,
I would blow you up into eternity.
Chamber of Horrors, just made for two,
With nothing to spoil our fun;
There would be such a heap of things to do,
I should get your rifle and bayonet too,
If you were the only Boche in the trench
And I had the only gun.

Other popular songs included

Rose Of No Man’s Land (1918) – a tribute to Red Cross Nurses

Over There (1917) – US patriotic song by George M Cohan

The Tanks That Broke the Ranks Out in Picardy (1916) – song celebrating the new tanks on the Western Front

Till We Meet Again (1918) – #1 smash of WWI

Further Reading:
Music of World War One (with MP3s and lyrics)
Music as War Propaganda
Music from the Great War
English Songs Popular during the First World War
Soldiers’ Songs of the Great War
First World War songs (MP3s)
Tommy’s tunes: a comprehensive collection of soldiers’ songs, marching melodies, rude rhymes, and popular parodies – Google Books

I am currently reading Reid Badger’s biography of James Reese Europe, A Life in Ragtime, and popped over to YouTube to see if someone uploaded a recording of his band. According to Badger, Europe and his orchestra were the first black musicians to sign a major recording contract in 1913. They recorded three sessions (though the last was never released by Victor Records), and the “Castle House Rag”, which Europe wrote specifically for the Castles, was recorded and released in February of 1914.

Sissieretta Jones

Opera singers were the world’s first pop stars, and the nineteenth century saw the apex of diva and divo worship, with hundreds of thousands left spellbound by the heavenly voices of Jenny Lind, Nelli Melba, Enrico Caruso, and Jean de Rezke, to name a few stars. Since this was before radio, and definitely before television and sound motion pictures, the opera found fans across the spectrum of class, social status, and even race. Into this unique setting, Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones made her debut.

Jones was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1869 to Jeremiah Malachi Joyner, an AME minister, and Henrietta Beale, from whom Jones is said to have inherited her voice. When she was seven, the family moved to Providence, Rhode Island in search of better economic and social opportunities, and it was in her new home where Jones began the many steps which led to her lasting fame. She enrolled in the Providence Academy of Music in 1883, the same year in which she wed David Richard Jones, a hotel bellman who was to become her great sorrow until their divorce in 1900, and later at the New England Conservatory of Music. She made her formal debut in Boston before an audience of 5,000, and 1892 was the year in which she garnered the name “the Black Patti”:

If Mme Jones is not the equal of Adelina Patti, she at least can come nearer it than anything the American public has heard. Her notes are as clear as a mockingbird’s and her annunciation perfect.

Though she preferred to be called “Madame Jones,” the nickname stuck.

The 1890s were the pinnacle of Jones’s career. She performed throughout the United States, Europe, Australia, the Caribbean, South America, and South Africa; sang before four U.S. Presidents (Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, and Roosevelt) and the British royal family; and became the first African-American to sing at the Music Hall in New York (renamed Carnegie Hall in 1893). She also collaborated with Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, singing parts of his Symphony No. 9, and a solo he wrote especially for her.

Despite this outstanding success, Jones found the doors to most of America’s concert halls closed to her, and when she formed the Black Patti Troubadours, the soprano diva discovered she had to walk the tightrope of American race relations as the group’s first shows featured only the minstrel and musical skits allowed to black performers. Jones was troubled by the minstrel skits, finding them demeaning, and she soon found a way to integrate opera arias and spirituals into the show to balance their image. Between the years 1896 to 1915, “Black Patti’s Troubadours” traveled internationally, performing operatic arias, art songs, and sentimental ballads, and served as training ground for thousands of black performers, including Bert Williams of Williams and Walker fame.

By the early 1900s, Black Patti’s Troubadours tightened its repertoire and now included original pieces which featured Jones in the diva roles denied to her: A Trip to Africa (1909-10), In the Jungles (1911-12), Captain Jaspar (1912-13), and Lucky Sam from Alabam’ (1914-15). During the travels of the group, later renamed the Black Patti Musical Comedy Company, accolades both written and tangible piled on her, and “Jones was given many gifts from admirers, among them, a medal from President Hippolyte of Haiti, a bar of diamonds and emeralds from the citizens of St. Thomas, an emerald shamrock from the Irish people of Providence and a diamond tiara from the governor general of a West Indies island. And she often wore her 17 medals across her chest during performances.”

Sissieretta gave two final performances: at the Grand Theater in Chicago and at the Lafayette Theater in New York City in October 1915, and returned home to Providence to care for her ailing mother. Her stint with the Black Patti Troubadours was rumored to bring in excess of $20,000 a year in profits, but Jones was penniless in her retirement, and she was forced to sell three of her four houses, and her jewels and mementos to remain solvent. When she died of cancer in 1933, at the age of 74, William Freeman, a real estate agent and president of the local NAACP had provided money for her bills and living expenses during the last years of her life, and he also paid for her burial in Grace Church Cemetery in Providence. A rather ignoble end for such a success, but Sissieretta Jones nonetheless paved the way for respected black entertainers to come, including Marian Anderson, who in 1955 was given the opportunity to sing in the Metropolitan Opera House of New York, which was denied to Jones in her lifetime.