When pop music confronted history

The first record I ever bought with my own money— as a sixth grader in 1953— was the novelty song "Istanbul," in which the Four Lads professed amazement that Turkey's largest city was once known as Constantinople.

The song was deliberately silly ("Every girl in Constantinople/Lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople/ So if you've a date in Constantinople/ She'll be waiting in Istanbul") but also proceeded on the assumption that record-buying teenagers actually knew and cared about history and geography. (To hear it, click here.)

"Istanbul's" release verse purported to teach some larger historical lesson about the temporary nature of names and places:

Even old New York was once New Amsterdam;
Why they changed it, I can't say;
People just liked it better that way.

To serious historians, the underlying democratic assumptions of such ditties are nonsense. New York's current name, they will point out, had nothing to do with what "people liked" and everything to do with the British gunboat that forcibly seized Manhattan island from its Dutch proprietors in 1664.

Stuyvesant's tyranny

Yet on further reflection the Four Lads' song comes closer to the truth than the dry historical facts. The British were able to seize New Amsterdam without firing a shot because the Dutch governor, the famously peglegged Peter Stuyvesant, was such a martinet that the local citizens refused to take up arms in his defense. They preferred the rule of English strangers to their tyrannical Dutch ruler. People just liked it better that way.

Throughout much of the 20th century until the cultural revolution of the mid-'60s, history was a major staple of popular songs for adolescents like me. Of course you had Noel Coward's sophisticated riffs on antiquity, such as Cleopatra's practice of dismissing her lovers by poisoning their soup ("They knew they had no time to waste/ When the gumbo got that funny taste"). The 1950 ballad "Bonaparte's Retreat," as sung by Kay Starr, drew analogies between the downfall of her love affair and Napoleon's disastrous retreat from Moscow. (Listen here.)

One's appreciation of such songs required at least some knowledge of and interest in the subject at hand. But other utterly silly songs about historical events achieved remarkable popularity too.

Jackson and Napoleon

Johnny Horton's "Battle of New Orleans" shot to the top of the charts for most of the summer of 1959 even though its text bore no resemblance to the actual battle won by Andrew Jackson in 1815 ("We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin'/There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago./ We fired once more and they commenced to runnin'/ On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico").

The similarly popular "Waterloo" of 1959— recorded by the anachronistically named Stonewall Jackson— was likewise notable more for its infectious rhymes and rock beat than for any genuine insight ("When a general, Napoleon of France,/ Tried to conquer the world he lost his pants"). To the extent that such songs had any point, it was to ridicule material that schoolteachers had presumably crammed down the throats of songwriters and record buyers alike.

On the other hand, a song like "Good Timin'," recorded by Jimmy Jones in 1960, offered several historical examples of people who were in the right place at the right time (David confronting Goliath, Queen Isabella hocking her jewels to finance the voyages of Columbus), then finished with the vocalist's first encounter with his girlfriend. In this unpretentious and probably inadvertent fashion, "Good Timin'" drew a connection between the great moments of history and the individual teenagers listening to the song. (Listen here.)

Custer's reluctant soldier

And who can forget "Please, Mr. Custer" and "Hey, Mr. Livingstone," two historical parodies of the early '60s? These songs were as much spoken as sung; the vocalist, Larry Verne, possessed a shrill and deliberately unmusical voice; the tunes themselves were virtually unsingable; yet they presumed a familiarity with both Custer's Last Stand of 1876 and Henry M. Stanley's search for the missionary David Livingstone in Africa in 1871.

"I had a dream last night/ About this coming fight," sings Verne as one of Custer's reluctant soldiers, over the sound of Indian chants and tom-toms beating in the background. "Somebody yelled, "'Attack!'/ And I wound up with an arrow in my back."

Of course, war is no joke. In today's pop world, goofy history has been elbowed aside by serious politics, as groups like the Dixie Chicks and Greenday tackle subjects like George W. Bush, Iraq, AIDS and global warming. Which is all to the good, I suppose.

On the other hand, a recent survey reported that history ranked last among the favorite subjects of American high school students. That makes sense— after all, dead people aren't as much fun as live ones. But the bizarre thing is, they once were.♦


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