University of Delaware historian David Suisman is known for his research on music and capitalism, particularly his excellent book Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Harvard UP, 2009), which won numerous awards and accolades. Suisman’s new book, Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers (U Chicago Press, 2024), brings that same erudition to the subject of music in the military. It is the most comprehensive look at military music to date, full of fascinating historical anecdotes and insights on what music does for military states and their soldiers. Our conversation explores music as a martial technology, used for purposes of morale, discipline, indoctrination, entertainment, emotional relief, psychological warfare, and torture.

In the public episode David and I talk about the military’s use of music from the Civil War through World War Two. Our Patrons will also hear David’s critique of how we think about music in the Vietnam War–he says Hollywood has completely misinformed us on the role of music in that conflict. We’ll also talk about the iPod and our more recent conflicts in the Middle East, and hear a detailed discussion of David’s research and writing methods, plus his reading and listening recommendations. 

If you’re not a Patron, you can hear the full version, plus all of our other bonus content for just a few bucks a month–sign up at Patreon.com/phantompower. 

00:00 Introduction

04:20 The US Military’s Investment in Music

05:30 Music’s Role in Soldier Training and Discipline

12:32 The Evolution of Military Cadences

23:22 The Civil War: A Turning Point for Military Music

28:21 Forgotten Brass Instruments of the Union Army

29:38 The Role of Drummer Boys in the Civil War

33:32 Music and Morale in World War I

35:48 Group Singing and Community Singing Movement

37:28 The YMCA’s Role in Soldier Recreation

38:41 Racial Dynamics and Minstrel Shows in Military Music

41:47 Music Consumption and the Military in World War II

45:27 The USO and Live Entertainment for Troops

49:56 Vietnam War: Challenging Musical Myths

50:26 Conclusion and Call to Support the Podcast

​[00:00:00] 

David Suisman: I describe music as functioning in some ways as a lubricant in the American War machine.

It makes the machine function or allows the machine to function. It enables the machine to function. 

Introduction: This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, a podcast about sound. I’m Mack Hagood. I just noticed that this month makes seven years that we’ve been doing this podcast, which feels like a pretty nice milestone. And in that time, we’ve really tried to keep the focus on sound as opposed to music.

There are a lot of fantastic podcasts about music, not nearly as many taking a really deeply nerdy approach to [00:01:00] questions about sound. And so that’s been our lane. That said, no one has managed to build a wall or police the border between sound and music. It’s a pretty fuzzy boundary and we’ve definitely spent a lot of episodes exploring that fuzzy boundary between the two.

And I guess the reason I bring this up is that this season has actually been Pretty musical so far. Our first episode this season was with Eric Salvaggio. We were talking about AI and its implications for music and then our second episode, with Liz Pelley, looked into the effects of Spotify on how we listen to music.

So two shows about how new sound technologies are reshaping music. Today’s show puts a slightly different spin on the relationship between music and technology. Today, we’re looking at music as a technology. A technology of war. My guest today is [00:02:00] University of Delaware historian, David Suisman. David is probably best known for his research on the history of music and capitalism.

Especially his excellent book, “Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music” that’s probably his best known work. Now, he’s bringing that same kind of erudition to the subject of music in the military. His new book is called Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers.

Long time listeners will know that I sometimes get a little cranky about music scholars and media scholars and the ways that we often focus on the kind of content that we like. We get a little fannish, we want to think about things like music as a force of self expression and political liberation.

Of course, music can be those things, but music can also be a technology of domination, of indoctrination, of disciplinarity, even [00:03:00] torture. And David Suisman’s “Instrument of War” is the most comprehensive look at military music that I’m aware of. If the subject matter sounds a bit grim, you’ll be happy to hear that this book is full of fascinating historical anecdotes. And in the public episode of this show, David and I are going to talk about the military’s use of music from the civil war all the way through World War II.

Our patrons will also hear David’s critique of how we think about music in the Vietnam War. He says that Hollywood has completely misinformed us on the way music worked in that war. We’ll also talk about the iPod and our more recent conflicts in the Middle East and hear a detailed discussion of David’s research and writing methods, plus his reading and listening recommendations.

If you’re not a patron, you can hear all of that material plus all of our other bonus content for just a few bucks a month. Sign up at [00:04:00] patreon.com/phantompower Okay, so without further ado, here’s my interview with historian David Suisman. 

David, welcome to the show. 

David Suisman: Thank you Mack. It’s great to be here.

Mack Hagood: Your opening sentence concerns a rather staggering figure about the United States military budget. Could you maybe tell us about that. 

David Suisman: It stopped me dead in my tracks when I found this little factoid in the course of my research. And that is that in 2015, 10 years ago, the US Congress allocated some $437 million to music by military bands and not just a raw number, but that was about three times the size of the entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Just let that sink in for a second. Like the government was spending almost three times as much on military music as all other support [00:05:00] for the arts combined. 

That really knocked me out.

Mack Hagood: It’s really incredible, and I love this as a strategy for opening a book because the number just speaks for itself, right? It boldly proclaims the stakes of the book for one thing, right? If music wasn’t perceived as deadly serious by the Pentagon, they really wouldn’t be spending this kind of money and fighting budget hawks on this issue since the Civil War, right?

There have been skeptics about the value of music to the military. But it also signals to scholars, to music scholars, that the military should really be front and center in our research agenda as well, right? 

David Suisman: Yeah, 

Mack Hagood: Why hasn’t it been?

David Suisman: Sound studies has done a lot of really creative work. but the state has not been very present in a lot of scholars’ frameworks. And one of the things that I was seeking to do, or one of the things that I was exploring in the course of working on this whole project, was trying to understand the [00:06:00] relationship between sound and the state.

I was thinking the state is important in the construction of modern, social formation. And so what is the role of sound in it? And what is, what does sound mean for the state? These were pretty abstract questions that I didn’t know how to answer for a long time. And then I found a few different places where they were manifested, but one of them was in thinking about music in the military. That was one of the places where the military is so important to the constitution of the state and the function of the state. And sound in the form of music being so central I realized, to the military. So that’s how I came to it and why I think it makes sense for the scholarship

Mack Hagood: And there’s certainly been some good research done. I’m thinking of Suzaane Cusik’s..

David Suisman: Acoustics work 

Mack Hagood: Acoustics work on musical torture, or Martin Daughtry’s work in his book “Listening to War” but in terms of a comprehensive study [00:07:00] of how music has been used by the United States military, I’m not familiar with any other book that really does this work.

David Suisman: There is surprisingly little on music in the military that’s not about, particularly songs, when people have written about music in the military, it’s often been song focused. About song lyrics, essentially. 

And, as I’m sure we’ll talk about, my book is much broader. More capacious than that.

Mack Hagood: Well, in fact that’s really why I thought it was a good fit for a sound studies podcast like this because, you don’t really focus on musical compositions or composers. Like I was really surprised at how little oral estate John Phillips Souza gets, 

David Suisman: Of mentions, yeah. 

Mack Hagood: But instead you’re really interested in, music as a sonic technology that’s used by the military on one hand, and then also by soldiers themselves or service members themselves on the other hand 

David Suisman: Yeah that’s exactly it. I’m [00:08:00] really interested in how music itself works as a technology, not about music technologies, as we usually use the term, but how music is used as a technology by the military to advance the military’s aims in war making. And it does so in this dialectical way, it works as a top down tool of the institution.

It functions to train and condition and discipline soldiers, and then as a bottom up tool of the rank and file, to basically address their own emotional and psychic needs. And these two work in concert with one another to keep the military going. 

I describe music as functioning in some ways as a lubricant in the American War machine.

It makes the machine function or allows the machine to function. It enables the machine to function. 

So in this respect, what I was interested in doing was looking past musical compositions or composers and thinking about what music [00:09:00] does in this, very Christopher Small musicking way 

Mack Hagood: Talk a little bit about that, for those who don’t know Small’s work, that concept of musicking? 

David Suisman: Yeah, he was a musicologist who posited that. It’s more constructive to think about music as a verb than a noun. And thinking about music as process more than product, as a kind of set of relationships that exists among people. 

And those people involve performers and or composers and performers and listeners, but also musical instrument makers and music publishers.

And in this case military officials who allow for music or promote music or tolerate music in the ranks. And that they are all responsible in this sort of interconnected way, in this complex, interconnected way for the phenomenon of music, which I don’t think he says this exactly, but one of the things I derive from his work is that you can’t really think about music [00:10:00] in the abstract.

Whenever you think about music in the abstract, it’s always a kind of music in particular. 

 That particularity varies, but music is something that exists in particular times and places. And so I’m thinking about music in action like Bruno Latour did with science. 

And, thinking about particular times and places, what is music? What is musical activity?

And that’s what I sought and the way that I sought to explore music in the military, in the book.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, absolutely. I would say another touchstone is, Foucalt’s work and thinking about disciplining the soldier. You do mention Foucalt’s “Discipline and Punish” 

As I recall, it talks about soldiers quite specifically and this sort of has an argument that in the 17th century soldiers were found, right? You looked for the man with a certain kind of body, who looked like a soldier that would be an effective soldier. And then by the end of the 18th century, soldiers were something that were made. [00:11:00] You found techniques to discipline the bodies of men and turn them into, what he calls a docile body.

A body that can be made useful, a body that can be organized in space and in time. And I think you show really persuasively that music is capable of doing that kind of work, and in fact, it’s probably essential to it. 

David Suisman: Yeah, it’s been really important. And if you think about stepping back for a second, one of the things that the modern nation state does is that it goes to war with other nation states. You have imperial, inter imperial wars, but the modern nation state wages war in particular ways.

And one of the ways is that it requires the mass production of soldiers. You need big armies not just as you put it, “finding soldiers” but actually manufacturing or mass producing soldiers in large numbers to wage war against one another. And music is not the only piece of this.

That’s not an argument that the music makes war. [00:12:00] Music is war. 

It’s that music is part of this process, an essential part of this process. It’s part of how the military transforms civilians into warriors, ordinary people who would not ordinarily kill other humans. And you transform them into people who (A) are capable of killing other people and in fact do that and following orders in very strict, regimented ways.

And so music is part of that discipline. We will probably come back to talking about the phenomenon of military cadences.

The chanting and bootcamp. But this sort of sounds off one, two. The guy who makes that a kind of systematic part of boot camp of basic training was a military officer named Bernard Lentz.

And he wrote this, he wrote, basically he wrote the manual on how to train drill instructors. And he did this in the 1920s, and the manual comes out in many additions. [00:13:00] And in that, he explains that by instituting this kind of call and response exchange between soldiers and drill sergeants or drill instructors, that the soldiers would be participating in this kind of rhythmic activity.

And by chanting in the call and response exchange, they, as he puts it, would be disciplining themselves. 

And it’s like the most Foucaultian phrase. He says, “Every man becomes his own drill master.” 

And I’ve never seen any record that Foucault had any awareness of this, but it’s a very Foucaultian conceit.

Mack Hagood: And because it’s that idea that somehow the body mind of the subject, of the individual internalizes the discipline that the state wants them to enact and embody. 

David Suisman: That’s right. That’s right. It’s that internalization of the discipline in a physical and also a kind of mental or psychological way, [00:14:00] but where it deviates from a strict Foucault model is that music also does something else. And that is that it’s a really invaluable tool for soldiers to preserve their own kind of psychic autonomy. 

In the military, which is what’s sometimes called a total institution, meaning people within it control almost nothing about their lives. You think about hospitals being something similar. You don’t control what you eat, in the military, you don’t control when you sleep often, you don’t even control when you go to the bathroom.

But one of the things that soldiers can do is they can control the music in their lives. They can sing, or when they have opportunities for recreation, for relaxing, they control the music. So they have control over very little, but they do control music. And music affects people very deeply.

.Mack Hagood: I would slightly differ to say that is also Foucault, but [00:15:00] in his later period, music as a technology of the self 

David Suisman: Yes. 

Mack Hagood: Which you say.

David Suisman: Which I do discuss. Yeah. Yeah. So you’re right. It’s a different Foucault 

Mack Hagood: A different Foucault. Yeah.

The friendlier, later Foucault. But that’s really interesting because we have this top down music, that’s instituted by the state.

So we have what you call field music, right? That’s the music that sort of instills that disciplinarity into the soldiers.

David Suisman: The field music is yeah it’s the drum beats, it’s the bugle calls. 

It’s telling soldiers what to be doing when and where they’re supposed to be, what they’re supposed to be doing at different times. So that’s the field music of say the Civil War. 

Drummers and buglers are the field music. They’re not the bands. The bands are different. 

Mack Hagood: And then the bands are also top down, but they’re, those are for entertainment purposes, recruitment purposes, that sort of thing, right? 

David Suisman: Yeah, the bands do so much work. Here I’m just talking about the Civil War, but it extends beyond the Civil War. But they [00:16:00] are doing recruitment work. They’re great for military civilian relations. And then within the military, military regiments in the Civil War went to the front with dedicated military bands accompanying them.

And they would have concerts basically every night. And the purpose of this was to keep soldiers’ morale up. Soldiers engage, and this is true for any war, soldiers engage in combat. The amount of time they spend in combat is very small. Most of the time they’re spending, most of the time they’re doing really boring things.

Things that are devastatingly boring and often, suffering from incredible amounts of homesickness. 

And so this music, these concerts every night were a way of keeping soldiers more or less entertained enough so that they could keep soldiering from one day to the next. They would also sing on the march, which is serving the military’s needs, but also serving the soldiers’ emotional needs.

So it works both ways.

Mack Hagood: Yeah.

And that piece of the [00:17:00] top down and the bottom up, I really think come together during the chapter on World War II, where you write about private Willie Lee Duckworth, who was marching to these cadences that Lentz prescribed but he injected something new into them.

Can you talk about him, who he was and then how he changed what we conceive of as a military march in the United States? 

David Suisman: Yeah, and I’ll start by saying that, most people have some familiarity, even if you’ve never served in the military, people have a sense of soldiers chanting these cadences in basic training. And the practice that we often associate that with is not only the one, two sound off, three, four, et cetera, but this kind of improvisation is often humorous.

Sometimes it’s a very macabre humor. Sometimes it’s very sexist humor. 

But this kind of improvisational call and response, chanting. [00:18:00] What’s interesting is that is not a timeless practice in the military. That dates back to this guy that you mentioned private Willie Lee Duckworth in I think it’s 1944, late in World War II II when he is in training at this, camp where the guy who wrote the book on how to train soldiers,

Bernard Lentz, he’s the commanding officer of the camp, and he hears Willie Lee Duckworth allegedly improvising this kind of call and response chanting. And he sees how much it elevates the morale and the sort of energy level of the trainees 

Mack Hagood: And we’ll play a little clip of that for folks, to hear what that sounds like. But you’ll recognize it. This is what we think of now as soldiers marching. 

David Suisman: Yeah [00:19:00]  Bernard Lens, he’s the commanding officer of the camp.

David Suisman: He hears Willie Lee Duckworth and he says, this is amazing. And he says, why don’t you write a bunch of these down? And he assigns him some other officers to do this with him. And then, he institutionalized this and he systematizes it and he makes a recording of it. And then that recording is circulated among other training camps.

And very quickly it becomes institutionalized practice within the military to have this kind of improvisational culture that comes originally out of African American prison [00:20:00] songs. And so it’s moving from one disciplinary institutional setting to another, 

Mack Hagood: I think this is really important to point out because I had no idea about this, Private Duckworth was black and so he was at what? He was in a… 

David Suisman: Segregated unit. 

Mack Hagood: Segregated unit. And so Lentz hears this segregated unit doing this kind of vocal performance, right? And then so that’s, when you really think about it, just from the sound of it, from what we know about, work songs and prison songs in the history of African American music, like it’s very recognizably an African American innovation.

And yet I never really piece those two things together. 

David Suisman: Yeah, this is the hidden history of this practice that most people are aware of on some level. The songs when they were in prison were called Jodi Songs, and this was allegedly, folklorists believe because there was a [00:21:00] recurring character in these songs named Joe Joe the Grinder.

He was called in prison songs. 

And Joe the Grinder was this opportunist who would go, and while somebody was in prison Joe the grinder would go and. Steal this guy’s girl, steal this guy’s money, steal this guy’s clothes, whatever. And so Joe the grinder, becomes Jodi. 

And in the military, these are known as Jodi calls because the character of Jodi gets brought into this military practice.

These chants they’re known as Jodi’s, a recurring character in the lyrics. And many, most soldiers know these as Jodi calls, as well as calling them cadences. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah, one thing that really struck me too was that Lentz seems to have given Duckworth full credit for this. In the record that I saw Duckworth’s picture is there and everything.

David Suisman: Yeah, there are some reasons to think that this story might be a little [00:22:00] apocryphal. 

There are some people who question its complete veracity. I think certainly was involved, but there’s some question that an African American private who was improvising doing this sort of vocal improvisation during training exercises might have very possibly been a form of insubordination. 

And subject to extreme punishment, so that he would’ve been doing this without some kind of sanction is maybe open to question. So I’m not sure that the Duckworth story is, let’s say the whole story, but it is certainly the story that is enshrined in like national military lore.

Mack Hagood: Nevertheless, just, even if this is a constructed narrative of some sort, the fact that a black man was the face of this innovation, that it wasn’t just appropriated and the race of the person who created it, or the people who created it was just suppressed. You hear people in the military saying that, like in [00:23:00] terms of, equity, that sort of thing, that the military has been a trailblazer and I guess this would lend some credence to that.  

David Suisman: Okay, sure. You say it’s, you could also say it’s, an extreme form of exploitation and appropriation.

Mack Hagood: Maybe I’m being too generous. 

David Suisman: There are a number of ways of reading it. Let’s say that, 

Mack Hagood: Okay. One thing that I wanted to just put on people’s radar is that you start this history with the Civil War, so I’m just curious to know why not earlier? Why do you begin the book with the Civil War? 

David Suisman: A couple of reasons. One of them is the first, it’s the first sort of modern war, first modern war of a modern nation state. it uses all the power of the nation state to wage war. It becomes the, it’s sometimes called the first total war. 

And it involves not just armies going to battle against each one another, but mobilizing entire societies against each other.

And in the course of that music is integrated in [00:24:00] new ways that become permanent in the military. So there was music in earlier wars in the Mexican American war and the Revolutionary War, and going back to time immemorial as long as we’ve had war, we’ve had music in war.

But it becomes institutionalized in this formal way. And it does so in part because it is integrated with the modern American music industries, the ability to produce all of the brass instruments. That was required for all the military bands in the Civil War. That ability depended on having an industrial infrastructure, particularly in the north, in the Union for the Union Army to scale up production of valved brass instruments.

In the very short time during the war, the The Confederate army also had bands but their bans were fewer and smaller and dependent on imported instruments by and [00:25:00] large.

Mack Hagood: So the Civil War is the beginning of this sort of systemization of war and the industrialization of war, and it’s interesting to think about musical instruments being part of that because, as I was reading the book, I was thinking about this huge military expenditure and wondering, we know that many things we take for granted today, were

invented through the huge military expenditures of the Pentagon. So things like radar or duct tape or nuclear power, or the internet, right? It all comes from the military. So what did the military invent in terms of music and musical instruments and musical technology? 

David Suisman: Interesting. I don’t think it’s been influential in the same way as inventing the internet. But one thing is it has been responsible for this civilian military fusion. The interconnectedness of the culture industry [00:26:00] and the military has been one of the innovations of having music in the military.

It hasn’t just been self-contained. It has grown in the military through its association and cultivation by the culture industry. It has produced a lot of musicians, a lot of musicians have served in the military and gone on to illustrate careers and so it’s a sort of training ground in that sense.

It reverberates that way. But I think maybe the most concrete way is to think about the way that. Music is involved in the militarization of American culture, really beginning around the turn of the 20th century. And here we get back to Sooza and the popularity of brass bands and wind bands that spills over.

It’s a military phenomenon essentially, but that becomes American popular culture. We have it even down to today. Every football game that has a marching [00:27:00] band at halftime is evidence of this long term reverberation of the militarization of American popular culture. The degree to which people are familiar with Soozan marches even today, Stars and Stripes Forever.

Even today, this is part of the air that we breathe in American popular culture. In a lot of ways, 

Mack Hagood: Do you think it was an indirect influence on jazz too? I’m thinking about, if I remember correctly, Louis Armstrong, learned to play the horn at the Colored Waifs Home. Which had a sort of military esque band that was part of, cultivating and disciplining the young students there. 

David Suisman: Yeah, I think you could totally make that argument that the availability of brass instruments is part of this explosion of brass band music that is interconnected with the Civil War. You don’t have jazz, you don’t have early jazz especially without that instrumentation.

And the standardization that goes [00:28:00] along with musical training that’s associated with brass bands. So I think there, there’s definitely that. Jazz comes into World War I in the segregated bands of the US Army, particularly James Reese Europe’s Band, which basically brings jazz to Europe for the first time. So there are certainly those interconnections as well. I would accept that. 

Mack Hagood: I was really blown away when you were talking about the Union Army hiring all of these German immigrant instrument makers who are making these cutting edge brass instruments, and you have a list of forgotten brass instruments that was really making me laugh. I’m gonna see if I can get to the page.

I think it’s page 26. Let me see if I can even read the names of these things, because they’re very peculiar sounding. 

David Suisman: Yeah. We have a sense that we know what musical instruments encompass today, but there are so many that were popular then that have been forgotten. They exist in museums now. But [00:29:00] not much else.

Mack Hagood: Yeah, so alt horns, bass tubas,. bombardons, burdens, clavichord, cornophones, saxtubas’, and sudrophone. I love to see these instruments. Do we have any around? I wonder if we have extra 

David Suisman: They are, they’re in museums and we have pictures of them. They look like variations on instruments that we’re familiar with tubas and trombones and that sort of thing. They don’t stand out. They don’t look like Dr. Seuss type, 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. I was letting my imagination run wild there 

David Suisman: Yeah. 

Mack Hagood: The Civil War really sets the stage for the military use of music in modernity in a lot of different ways. But some of the practices would seem very strange to us. And one of them is the use of drummer boys. Can you talk about the drummer boy and who he was?

Maybe how many of them there were because he really became an [00:30:00] icon of the Civil War there. 

David Suisman: Yeah, one of the things that fascinates me about this whole project is some stuff seems really familiar and some stuff seems really foreign. And the proliferation of drummer boys in the Civil War was one of the things that seemed really foreign. There were thousands of them, and most of them, not all of them, were in fact young boys.

They were often too young to enlist in the army. There the most famous one was this guy Robert Henry Hendershot, who enlisted in the Union Army at the age of 11. He claimed to be the youngest person in the union Army, but in fact, other researchers believed that there were now drummers who were younger than him.

Maybe nine and ten years old. 

They served with military units and they were the communication system for officers telling soldiers what to do, when to do it, and where to do it. So they would say, assemble, or they would say March or they’d say, go left, or go right or start shooting or stop shooting.

And drummers and [00:31:00] buglers were audible. The reason why they did this is because they were audible over distances, and they were audible over the cacophony of combat. You could hear them. And they would be at the elbow of commanding officers. The commanding officer would say, “Do the drumbeat for march” 

Not only is the phenomenon of the drummer boy interesting. And these, I should say, became these figures in popular culture. There were songs about them, there were plays about them, there were novels about them. So they were well known at the time, and they were endeared in this kind of nostalgic way.

But the other thing that’s fascinating about them is that these drum beats that the drummer boys beat out were recognizable to all the soldiers. Part of soldiering required that they could recognize all these different drum beats, dozens of them in some cases that they would say, oh, that’s the drum beat for assemble.

That’s the drumbeat for, eat, go to sleep, whatever.

Mack Hagood: Yeah that’s fascinating. It’s reminiscent of what Jonathan Stern would call an audile technique, [00:32:00] right? Like a, a mode of listening that we get in modernity that gets very specific and detailed in a particular way. And just to think about these young boys being utilized as a communication technology is pretty fascinating.

And I think part of the setting that we need to set for people and thinking about the drummer boys’ importance is that you point out this is the first war where the amount of gun smoke generated is truly like blinding. Like you you really quite often can’t see, right? There’s, and there’s also this volume of bombardment that was unprecedented at the time as well, 

David Suisman: Yeah, to be fair, it’s the first American time. The Napoleonic Wars I think had a lot of this smoke as well. So the 19th century phenomenon of lots of smoke sounds being essential to communication. 

You couldn’t rely on visual cues. You couldn’t rely on SEMA fours or whatever, for visual cues, and that’s why the sound became so [00:33:00] important. As much as we can bore into the Civil War I don’t want listeners to get the sense that this is a Civil War book, because it’s really just the point for that. 

Mack Hagood: no, not at all. Not at all. Not at all. And in fact, I was about to jump forward and just touch on some of the other wars that you discuss. And the book. It’s not entirely centered on specific wars. It is taking a wider view, but for the purposes of this podcast, it’s an easy way to organize our discussion.

And I was really interested that by World War I, I this sort of systemization and industrialization of war have really intensified and we start to get sort of psychological conceptions of war. And so like a, a term that comes to the forefront that you mentioned earlier, was the concept of Morale you, you talk about morale as a, as an idea and how [00:34:00] music was useful to the military as they were trying to cultivate morale.

David Suisman: Morale is crucial to military planning, military management in World War I. There it rises, it doesn’t, there’s morale, people talk about morale earlier, but it becomes a really key concept in military management around World War I and morale. Funny because it encompasses different things.

It encompasses mental health, general attitudes, general like levels of happiness attitudes about the war. It doesn’t mean one specific thing, but, music Works for elevating all of them. Whatever you mean by morale, music helps it and it helps people’s mental health.

It improves their disposition about where they are and what they’re doing. It doesn’t make them love the war necessarily if they don’t want to be soldiers. But it has this kind of multi versatile, multi-function effect. And in the First World War, military managers, military, senior officials looked on [00:35:00] music as an essential sort of marshal technology There’s a general in World War I named Leonard Wood, hardcore guy. He’d been a rough rider during the Spanish American war. He was a hero of the Indian wars. And he says, he’s talking about singing here specifically. But singing was a big part of music in World War I. He says it sounds odd to the ordinary person when you tell him every soldier should be a singer because the layman cannot reconcile singing with killing.

But it is just as essential that the soldiers should know how to sing as that they should carry rifles and learn how to shoot them. 

So this is part of the idea of what an operational military includes, encompasses how it works, it has that kind of function and so morale is a big part of that.

Mack Hagood: I was really struck by the role of group singing in World War I. There you show these photographs of men singing together. Where did this phenomenon come from? 

David Suisman: It is such a singing [00:36:00] war. There has always been singing in war, but there were, I think probably if you had to say one war where there was the most singing, it probably would’ve been World War I and because, and it was because it was integrated in, there were these events called Mass Sings.

These were daily or weekly singing sessions at training camps throughout the United States preparing American soldiers for war. And they were led by these volunteer song leaders who would come and they would. Lead Marines sailors, army soldiers, whatever, in song, in large numbers.

It grows out of both the sense of what singing can do in the military, in a sense part of military history. And it grew out of the contemporary movement called the Community Singing Movement which involved a lot of large community singing as a recreational and morally uplifting activity.

The 19 tens, it was in the early first couple of decades of the 20th [00:37:00] century. There was a lot of community singing, and so this is also an outgrowth of that. And yes, these pictures are really arresting. Thousands and thousands of soldiers joining together in song.

Often in the pictures you can see soldiers holding song sheets or songbooks. US soldiers were issued song books as part of their essential equipment in World War I. This floored me to learn that, they got the rifle, they got the knapsack, they got the songbook. 

Mack Hagood: That’s amazing. And the YMCA part of this was the early days of the YMCA. Do you remember?

David Suisman: The YMCA was crucial in World War I. I. In later awards, it plays an important role too, but it’s part of this military civilian institution interchange this sort of mutually constitutive aspect of war depending on these civilian institutions. And it was the provider for the military of facilities where soldiers could go for relaxation, for recreation.

And so when [00:38:00] soldiers were not soldiering, when they were not in combat, when they were not, going through drills and they had downtime, they didn’t have yet, they didn’t have enlisted men’s clubs the way we’d have in later wars. They would go to these YMCA facilities called huts and the huts would have equipment for soldiers to write letters home. There were to be books and invariably there was musical equipment, there were pianos, and there were phonographs. 

And so the YMCA was the official designated supplier of recreation facilities for the military. And it included music in all of those facilities,

Mack Hagood: That’s fascinating. Now, it would be a glaring omission, I think, if I talked with you about the Civil War and World War I and music and not bring up, minstrel shows and just the sort of racialized dynamics of music in this era of popular music in [00:39:00] America. Could you maybe talk a little bit about race and music at that time? 

David Suisman: In the Civil War, World War I era. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah.

David Suisman: Yes, it’s complicated. There are a lot of different ways of coming at this. One of them is thinking about the roles of the African American troops. The other is thinking about blackface, minstrelsy and the imprint that had on the white troops. The songs that soldiers sang in the Civil War, for example, were a mix of kind of parlor ballads and sentimental songs, and songs that came out of the blackface minstrel tradition.

There are photographs. I have a couple in the book of soldiers involved in recreation in World War I I who put on blackface minstrel shows. 

Mack Hagood: And if I remember correctly, some of the supplies that soldiers were given were, like burnt cork and things like this to,

David Suisman: were, this was, yeah, it was part of the apparatus, if you will, of music in the military was 

supplying equipment to put on [00:40:00] shows which were often mil blackface, minstrel shows. Yeah.

Mack Hagood: and then for the African American soldiers. What was their musical experience like and was there crossover between these two groups? 

David Suisman: The US military was segregated until 1948. And so, if you’re talking about the Civil War, you’re talking about World War I, even World War II, they tended to have something, they had their own bands. 

They had their own musical cultures, their own musical traditions by and large. Their music involved the music of the Army as a whole, but it also involved its own uniqueness.

Contributions as well. So the soldiers, the colored troops of the Union Army in the Civil War, had their own. A lot of them came. A lot of them were formerly enslaved. People who brought their musical traditions, African American civilian musical traditions into the military they adapted [00:41:00] spirituals into, military songs as military songs in the Civil War in World War I, I I already mentioned James Reese Europe.

He was the leading band leader in the Ragtime New York musical world. And he becomes the leading. Band leader in the Army, and it was pretty much widely agreed upon. The African American bands in World War I were the best bands. 

 The other bands there were not the only bands.

There were a lot of bands that were not these African American bands, but they’re the ones that people talked about, and they’re the ones that most people know about today. But I, one of the things I try to show in the book is that there was a bigger culture of which they were only one part.

Mack Hagood: And so they were the ones who brought a jazz sensibility to Europe. 

David Suisman: Exactly. Exactly. 

So jumping forward to World War II, you talk about a shift that has been discussed In popular music studies, ethnomusicology, musicology, which is that people. Become [00:42:00] music consumers in the sort of, somewhere between the invention of the phonograph, And by the time of World War II, standing together with a bunch of guys and singing isn’t the predominant form of musicking anymore, right? Like where people are used to consuming music. So how did the military respond in World War II, to this new type of music listener that was their military service personnel? 

Singing doesn’t disappear. One of the things I just wanna sort of stress is that there is this trend that you’re talking about where there’s an increased amount of music consumption but singing persists up through Vietnam.

David Suisman: In Vietnam, one of the CBS news reporters who asks Marines during the Tet Offensive of 1968, “How do you enter, how do you keep your spirits up at night? And the Marine says, we play cards and sing”

And this is 1968. So [00:43:00] singing doesn’t disappear and there is both formal and informal singing in the military.

But in answer to your question the military records it, it is a whole series of records just for soldiers called V discs. And these were a mix of some military music, but a lot of popular music, many by very well known music, jazz musicians and swing musicians of the era. Some other kinds of music, some light classical too.

The military produce these records, ship them out to military units all over the world on a regular basis, and the soldiers would then play them on phonographs that the military had issued to these individual units. So this is part of keeping, keeping up with the transformation of musical practice.

In civilian life throughout the 20th century there were phonographs, there was phonograph use in World War I as well, but it became much [00:44:00] more, much broader, much more expanded and much more systematized in World War II. The military also created a worldwide radio network for the first time, the Armed Forces Radio Network.

And so soldiers in World War II listened, sat around listening to the radio and they listened to radio shows that were modeled on the music shows of the American Homefront. And so the goal of the military by World War II II was to try to create conditions that were as close to soldiers’ lives as consumers as possible.

They try to give them all the consumer comforts at least in this case, through music the oh, but just an example of how, and sometimes the line is blurred between them. So another thing that, another initiative during World War II was that the military issued these monthly circulars that were sent to soldiers called the Army Hit Kit.

Every month they would get in the mail through the postal service, the military postal service, [00:45:00] an eight page circular with the song lyrics of the, of current and recent popular songs. And sometimes those songs were the same songs that were included with the latest batch of records. 

And sometimes it was also expected that they would have the lyrics so they could sing them even without the records. So there was an expectation that there would still be singing even though there was also a lot of musical listening at the time.

Mack Hagood: Wow. Wow. And then of course we also get the in-person entertainment from the USO. Can you maybe talk about the USO as that? ’cause this was a massive initiative. First of all, we have to remember there were 16 million. People in the combat theater like that’s just an incredible number of people that you need to entertain.

And the idea that they try to entertain them, not only through media, but also in person, is just just a staggering [00:46:00] effort to, to think about. 

David Suisman: Yeah it grows out of an effort. Again, growing out of World War I, there was an effort to work with the vaudeville industry in the major impresarios in World War I to supply live entertainment vaudeville shows for soldiers in World War I and in World War I, it works but by the time you get to World War ii, ii, they’re ready. a number of organizations come together and they form what’s called the United Service Organizations to supply places where soldiers could come together and dance for forms of informal recreation. And so on. And then they would also have these live shows and they, this was a, basically a subsidiary of the USO, it’s called the Camp Shows Inc.

And this was the part of the USO that staged shows by the most famous stars for the GIS stationed all over, but also not just the most famous. Stars because as you were mentioning, there were 16 million men and women who served in the military in World War II, [00:47:00] and that required a lot of shows.

And so there was the A list, there were the top stars, the big the big stars, and then there was the B list, and then there was the C list. And they would just send out as many entertainers as they could recruit to work for the military, to entertain troops to keep their spirits up. And sometimes they were great and sometimes they were not so great, but generally the soldiers would go along with it because they were in effect captive audiences.

They didn’t have any other options for live entertainment. Even a kind of mediocre live show, was better than no live show if you’re sitting in a foxhole somewhere. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. Yeah. One, one thing that I found just, I don’t know, it was a little bit difficult to come to terms with, was thinking about the USO. These sorts of clubs and canteens where you mentioned they would have dances and that there were these hostesses who were expected [00:48:00] to dance with all these servicemen. Can you talk about that role and the emotional labor that must have been involved? 

David Suisman: I can, and, but I can’t do so without calling attention to the great work of Sherry Tucker on this. Her book, dance Floor Democracy is a really brilliant, 

Exploration of this. And she talks about the canteens as these places where there was a really, a great deal of emotional labor going on.

There were supposed to be these really democratic spaces where. High ranking soldiers were dancing next to the lowest privates and so on, 

In, and they were supposed to be racially integrated. In fact, they weren’t necessarily racially integrated. And their real story is more complicated than the legend, or the lore that grows up around these canteens.

But the thinking was they were opportunities for these servicemen, or people who were about to get shipped out to dance with young women who were happy to [00:49:00] do so under very strictly supervised conditions. There was not supposed to be that, it was supposed to be just dancing. 

And they, the women who worked as hostesses generally felt like they were performing a really valuable kind of patriotic service.

They were helping to give this young man what could be. In truth, his last dance, and he is gonna give his life for the country. The least that somebody could do would be to dance for them on the dance floor. 

So this is the logic underpinning the canteens.

And it was this era, it was the swing era when there was this idea that swing was this kind of democratic force in American popular life.

Mack Hagood: Wow. It’s just, yeah, it’s really something to think about moving forward to the Vietnam War and to the US incursions into Iraq and in Afghanistan in the War on Terror. The Vietnam War has a certain kind of [00:50:00] mythology around it, as you say. What did you want to do?

Sort of do with your chapter on Vietnam. What did you want to add to the musical story? What did you maybe wanna subtract from the musical story? 

David Suisman: I wanted to overturn the musical story. I almost called the chapter on Vietnam. Almost everything you know about music in the Vietnam War is wrong. 

Mack Hagood: Yeah. So break it down for us. What do we have wrong about that 

Mack Hagood: David did indeed break down the musical mythology of Vietnam for us. We also talked about headphone use as a form of self care in the War on Terror, David Suisman’s methods as a historian and a writer, his reading and listening recommendations. So much stuff. It’s like a whole Extra half hour of content.

But if you’re hearing this, it means you’re either on the public feed of the podcast or you’re watching on YouTube. And my request to you is this, please join us on the Patreon. It’s three [00:51:00] bucks a month. I fund this podcast out of pocket. I lose money on every episode I make. It would be really great if I could just break even.

But more importantly than that, I just get such a great feeling when someone joins the Patreon, because it shows me that this show is valuable enough to them that they want to support it. And I actually just did the numbers and it looks like we’ve got about between one and 2 percent of people who are going to listen to this episode who are actually subscribed to the Patreon.

If I could get that number up to 5%, I could outsource some of the technical heavy lifting. Thing that makes this show so time consuming for me. And I could possibly even do two episodes a month. So if you want to support, go to patreon.com/phantom power. And if the financial thing is not for you, you can also just join up as a free Patreon member, be part of the community.

I love that as well. Another thing you can do is just tell a friend about the [00:52:00] show. It’s been a while since I asked folks to do that, but it really would help us grow a lot. Our next show is a round table about the cassette tape with three amazing scholars of that technology and the communities that have evolved out of that technology.

We’ve got Rob Drew, Eleanor Patterson, and Andrew Simon. It’s going to be fantastic. So look for that next month. And that’s it for this episode of Phantom Power. Huge thanks. To David Suisman for being on the show, and I want to thank my assistants Nisso Sacha and Katelyn Phan for their editing assistance and transcription work.

And I want to thank Blue the Fifth for our outro music. See you next time. [00:53:00] 

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