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Reviewed by Kenneth J. Bindas | Book Review | The Indiana Magazine of History, 104.2 | The History Cooperative
104.2  
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June, 2008
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REVIEWS

The Songs That Fought the War
Popular Music and the Homefront, 1939–1945

By John Bush Jones
(Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 338. Bibliography, index of song titles, general index. $29.95.)

When John Bush Jones heard the opening strains of a song he had not heard for over sixty years, memories flooded his consciousness. His experience demonstrates that music can play a very important role in our lives and can be used as a roadmap of sorts to gain a view into the past. The Songs That Fought the War serves as a way to comprehend the immensity and impact of World War II on the Amer-ican people, and, even though many of the songs that Jones examines were neither hits nor of high quality, they do reveal the multivariate ways in which the people came to see and understand this seminal conflict. Jones does not undertake this mission out of sentiment though, but "to fill a void" (p. ix). Jones compiled a listing of 1,700 songs, some recorded, some only published, some never published or recorded, to better document how popular music tried to define and understand the global conflict. The result is a comprehensive thematic overview of the mindset of the American people and how writers of popular music tried to document the collective understanding of their generation. . . .
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