[ In 160115 MMDigest, 'Seek "America, I Love You" on Piano Rolls',
 [ Prof. Bill Brooks wrote that he is searching for recordings of piano
 [ rolls "to determine how the music actually sounded at the time..."

Hello, Bill.  Noticed your post in the Mechanical Music Digest (which
I subscribe to because I have a 1915 player piano and am interested in
what makes it tick, and how to keep it going).

I understand you're concentrating on piano rolls of WW1 songs right
now, or recordings made from them, but I hope you're not missing out
on all the great WW1 songs that were recorded on phonograph cylinders
and discs during the war.  I have an Edison cylinder player myself,
and I collect WW1 songs on cylinders to play on it, and I also have
some conventional records and a player for them.  (Needless to say,
our player piano also has plenty of rolls of WW1 songs).

"I Ain't Got Weary Yet" is a good one I have on a cylinder (the singer
says he's digging trenches all day long, but never gets weary of it),
and another favorite of mine is "Where Do We Go From Here, Boys?"

There are people selling CDs with these WW1 recordings on them too;
I have one around here somewhere that I got off eBay a few years ago.
The old records give you not only the music but the voices of
contemporary singers, who seemed to work hard to inject a lot of
pathos (or alternately, rousing patriotism) into them.

My father, who was born in 1912, often told me how during WW1 his
father bought his mother a phonograph to give her (and the kids)
something to occupy their time during his frequent absences on the
railroad (he was a train crewman).  Unfortunately, his father only had
enough money left over after buying the phonograph to buy a couple of
records for it, at first anyway, one of them being "Chief Bugaboo,"
a WWI song about an Indian chief who "heard the call of war" and
decided to go back on the warpath, and to "help the Yanks" by going to
France to "scalp old Kaiser Bill."

My father and his siblings must have played that record often enough to
drive their parents nuts, and also to embed the song deep into in the
kids' subconscious minds, because later on, when my father was a pilot
in World War Two,  he said that whenever things got stressful during
a flight he'd always find himself singing "Chief Bugaboo" until the
crisis passed.

When my brothers and I were very small, my mother used to sing us
lullabies, but my father sang us Chief Bugaboo.  The song must have had
a terrible grip on him, but he seemed to enjoy it every time he sang it.

Another song my father and his siblings played all the time (and that
he sang to us) was "Can You Tame Wild Women?" but I don't know if this
was really a WW1 song, unless it was sung by American doughboys who met
certain kinds of French girls.  The song, set in a circus, claims that
while a lion tamer can subdue all manner of wild beasts, no one in the
world can tame a wild woman (one-hundred year old wisdom that still
holds true, I think).

Tom Baker