This Week In Wartime Music
This week’s UK album chart was topped by the 92-year old Dame Vera Lynn and her album, We’ll Meet Again – The Very Best Of. That makes her, per NME, “the oldest living artist ever to have a number one LP” (suck it, Dylan). Good for her.
So . . .
Maybe it’s yankee ignorance, or maybe it’s the fact that she’s 60 years older than me, but . . . um, who the heck is Vera Lynn?
I yield the floor to Wikipedia:
Dame Vera Lynn, DBE (born 20 March 1917) is a British singer whose career flourished during World War II, when she was nicknamed “The Forces’ Sweetheart“. Among her popular songs are “We’ll Meet Again” and “The White Cliffs of Dover“. She is considered one of the major Allied entertainers of World War II.
Give the rest of that entry a good reading, as it reveals quite the incredible life.
Here is the aforementioned “White Cliffs Of Dover”, released in 1942:
Vera Lynn – (There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs Of Dover
Further internet sleuthing (I was really bored yesterday) yielded a recording of Vera Lynn performing the German love song, Lili Marlene (scroll down on that link for more info as to why a British singer would be singing a German song during the war), a song that was covered by The Divine Comedy a couple years ago. Let’s listen to both (compare and contrast, yo):
The Divine Comedy – Lili Marlene
Next week in “This Week In Wartime Music”: The Civil War songs of George Frederick Root.
Or not.
Related posts:
Robyn Hitchcock’s “The Yip Song,” annoying as it may be at times,
cites Vera Lynn throughout the song. The last verse is thusly:
This old man, he was gone-he was gone and I was sorry
Vera Lynn, Vera Lynn
Down I spiral, down I spin
Forces sweetheart, I’m your twin now
Vera Lynn
Yip
I think the annoying quality of the song – and, oh, how annoying it is – made me overlook the Vera Lynn reference.