Word: songbooks
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Sing Out, Sweet Land! (book by Walter Kerr; produced by the Theater Guild) is a songbook history of American life. Combining folk music with Tin Pan Alley tunes, it warbles its way across the centuries-the voice of a canoeman floating down the Ohio, a chorus raised in an Illinois clearing, a medley of tunes on a Mississippi steamboat, a soldiers' rouse round a Civil War campfire, the guttural throb of Negro blues, the frilly ditties of the Gay Nineties, the brash rhythms of speakeasy jazz...
...Post Office called the songbook "lewd and obscene," even though it had been reviewed by the military. Post Exchanges continued to sell it. Men in service, never noted for dainty diction, continued to sing of disrespect and dirt as they went about their dirty business: We had a major and his name was Tack...