Skip to main content

It’s Been A Long, Long Time

March 2023
1min read

We’ll Meet Again: The Love Songs of World War II

Smithsonian, two CDs $32.97 , CODE: SMP-1 ; two cassettes $29.97 , CODE: SMP-2

The songs in this marvelous collection, writes the music historian Robert Bamberger in the excellent explanatory pamphlet that accompanies it, “cannot be mistaken, or burdened, to tell all we want and need to know about that time. But there is still much that these songs do tell, and what they obscure may not be as important as what they illuminate. Though not shared memory itself, the love songs of World War II are a window into its heart, against the day that is coming, when remembrance is second-hand.”

It’s extraordinary, the artless power these songs can exert fifty years later. While a sometime rouser like “Goodbye Mama, Fm Off to Yokohama,” has become the quaintest of period pieces, Peggy Lee singing the number from which the album takes its title can break your heart. It may not be surprising to find that Bing Crosby’s canny, honeyed fluency doesn’t age much, but how nice to rediscover the melancholy ease of the Ink Spots singing “Don’t Get Around Much Any More.”

There are forty-two songs on this album, and every one is worth listening to. Even the silliest of them (probably “Ma, I Miss Your Apple Pie,” by the Jesters) is both sweetened and magnified by the tremendous time whose travails and yearnings it helped express.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "May/June 1994"

Authored by: William B. Meyer

American attitudes toward them have taken a 180-degree turn over the last century—and so have the battles they provoke

Authored by: John Steele Gordon

Mary Mallon could do one thing very well, and all she wanted was to be left to it

Authored by: The Editors

Zipper: An Exploration in Novelty

Authored by: The Editors

Alone With the President

Authored by: The Editors

The Authentic Guide to Drinks of the Civil War Era, 1853–1873

Authored by: The Editors

Ride With Me—Connecticut

Authored by: The Editors

We’ll Meet Again: The Love Songs of World War II

Authored by: The Editors

The Home Front, 1938–1945

Authored by: The Editors

Gershwin Plays Gershwin
The Piano Rolls

Authored by: The Editors

The Hudson Valley

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.