SONGS THAT CURE SHELL SHOCK.

New Zealand Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic Review, Issue 1524, 10 July 1919, Page 33

SONGS THAT CURE SHELL SHOCK.

QUIET MELODIES AND TENDER BALLADS. A recent despatch from Paris contained the following eloquent passage: “A woman’s voice crooning ‘The Little Gray Home in the West’ sounded beyond the closed door of the shell-shock ward in a base hospital near one of the old camps. ‘That’s our new cure for shell shock,’ said the surgeon who was conducting a visitor through the hospital.” Impressed with this statement a New York “Musical Courier” representative, who has been making the rounds of the home camps recently, made some inquiries on his own account and found that the opinions of surgeons, nurses and the soldiers themselves completely bore out the idea contained in the quoted message from France. A former concert singer in New York, Miss Ayers, has some interesting experiences to tell about this. She was introduced by the surgeon as “the song physician.” For weeks she had been singing the shell-shocked boys back to normality. She said she always chose the quiet

ballads, those with a sweet, haunting melody and a, touch of tender sentiment Dial reached the heart. Such songs as that quoted in the despatch, and others like “Mother Machree,” “Somewhere a Voice is Calling,” “The Sunshine of Your Smile,” and “The Magic of Your Eyes,” as well as the lullaby songs, were those the boys liked the most and those that proved the most effective. Her first stanza usually quieted all but a few of the worst cases, and after half a dozen songs a few men were joining in the refrains. It was the first time some of them had repeated words coherently since they were stricken. Psychiatrists of the university lecture halls call this treatment “musicotherapy.” But it isn’t only the shell-shock sufferers who prefer the quiet and appealing ballads. The boys in all the camps ever welcome a ballad above all else. Ask any singer who has sung to them often amid camp surroundings and they will tell you the same story. “The Magic of Your Eyes” and all the other songs of the same type are those that find the greatest favour with the returned soldiers everywhere. One reason, no doubt, for the popularity of this kind of song is to be found in the fact that there is nothing about them to remind our boys of the hardships they endured and the trials they bore so cheerfully and with such fortitude, and thus the song makes a doubly strong appeal to them, for few if any of these millions want to be reminded of those experiences. It is enough for them to know that they met and overcame them, and they turn now longingly and refreshingly to the things of sentiment, the beautiful and the soothing things that make life once more clean and worth while.