From "Rosie the Riveter" to "Der Fuehrer's Face:" Using Popular Music to Understand American Culture During World War II, 1939-1945
Abstract
The story of American popular music during World War II begins before Pearl
Harbor. Shortly after war broke out in Europe in 1939, war-related songs imported from
England were published in the United States. American popular songwriters began
penning war-conscious songs in September 1940, when Congress established the first
peacetime draft and "the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" became a buck private. Because so
many war-themed songs appeared before America's declaration of war, American
popular music in World War II can be defined as music written in the United States
between 1939 and the war's end in 1945, including both the hit songs-because they
reached the widest audience-and the less-popular songs that failed to find resonance
with listeners during the war. Although some of these songs have become timeless, all
of them were written at an extraordinary moment of American history and are very much
rooted in that time.