Friend or Foe Tickets

Myths and realities: British popular song of the First World War

The reader may well know of ten or twenty songs released during the Great War: “Pack up Your Troubles” “If you were the only girl in the World” “Tipperary” and “Keep the Home Fires Burning” perhaps. But there were at least five thousand songs released in Britain during the war, as well as hundreds of soldier songs and the immense majority have been completely forgotten. Over the last few years I have put together a corpus of just over a thousand of them, and found that the reality of the repertoire is very different from the stereotypes we have of songs of the time.