“THERE’S A LONG, LONG TRAIL.”

Waikato Independent, Volume XXXIII, Issue 3046, 31 August 1933, Page 7

“THERE’S A LONG, LONG TRAIL.”

AUTHOR OF FAMOUS SONG PASSES. Those who in the war years were moved —as much greater music before and since has failed to move them — by the yearning lilt of “A Long, Long Trail A-winding,” will learn with regret that the author of this famous song, Mr Stoddart King, has just died at Washington after a long illness at the age of 43. He wrote the song (another American, Mr Zo Elliott, composed the tune) before the war when he was a student at Yale University. It “caught on ” for some months, and was then forgotten—until British soldiers in France began to sing it on the march. Soon the Germans in the opposing trenches were singing it too. It was carried to Mesopotamia, to Italy, to every hamlet in Britain. It was not music of distinction ; the war songs were not great music. But it was entered, like a half-dozen other war-time songs, into the emotional consciousness of an entire generation. It is a part of the music that wrings the heart. Neither in Britain nor the United States was Mr Stoddart King’s name well known. The authors of songs which stir two continents often win neither fame nor financial reward. Mr Gitz Rice, who wrote “ Mademoiselle from Armentieres” in 1915, when he was serving with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France, declared recently that he had “never received a cent” for this famous song, which —in one version or another —is known to everyone who served in the British Army during the war. Other composers of songs which acquired immortality during the war have been more fortunate. Early this

year the Cross of the Legion of Honour was conferred upon M. Camille Robert, the composer of “La Madelon,’ a song which was as popular with French soldiers as was “Tipperary” and “A Long, Long Trail,” with our own. To its. inspiring strains the French Army marched through the Arc de Triomphe on Victory Day, 1919.

It was not written as a war song. A music hall artist, M. Bach, obtained the score early in 1914 from M. Robert, who was on the verge of giving up composing as a “thankless trade,” and in 1916 sang it at a soldiers’ concert behind the lines. Its appeal was immediate. No other song enjoyed such favour in the French ranks—with the possible exception of the very Gallic ditty which immortalises the misfortunes of an obscure stationmaster. It was an expression of indomitable refusal of the French nation to allow its spirit to be broken by carnage and suffering. One has only to hear this glorious absurdity sung in a Paris music hall to-day to realise what poignant memories of the war it awakens in the hearts of an audience. No historian of the future will be able to ignore the evidence which the war songs furnish of the changing moods of the belligerent nations. For it was by catching the prevailing mood of the time —defiant, exultant, subdued, resigned—that they leaped into fame.