In part 2 of American Popular Song and World War II we’ll hear music from Louis Jordan (”You Can’t Get That No More”), Kitty Kallen with Jimmy Dorsey (”They’re Either Too Young or Too Old”), Sam Donahue’s Navy band (”Convoy”), a rare recording of Bing Crosby with Glenn Miller’s…

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In honor of the holiday weekend, we’re posting both parts of last year’s “American Popular Song and World War II” Afterglow program, featuring special guest Michael McGerr, author, cultural historian, and Indiana University professor. We’ll hear some of the martial-spirited songs from the early months of America’s entry into the war (”Remember Pearl Harbor” and “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition”), as well as pre-war songs about the draft, songs about…

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Wrapping up our series this week of Duke Ellington Treasury shows: In August of 1945 the United States’ war with Japan ended suddenly, and the war bonds that Ellington promoted every Saturday on “Your Date With the Duke” turned into “Victory Bonds.” His bond pitches placed special emphasis on the many wounded and injured veterans returning–or soon to return–from the war. In this program we’ll hear broadcasts from that month of “Work Song” and “The Blues” from Ellington’s…

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This edition of our ongoing Duke Ellington Treasury series features mid-summer performances from an Ellington appearance at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, including “Day Dream,” “Carnegie Blues,” and a medley of Billy Strayhorn tunes with Strayhorn at the piano, while Marie Ellington (no relation, but Nat King Cole’s future wife) and Al Hibbler take turns…

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Duke Ellington was on the road during the summer of 1945 promoting the war-bond drive, and some of this program’s selections come from an Evansville, Indiana concert. In addition to “Indiana,” we’ll hear the Ellington orchestra performing “Body and Soul,” Ellington’s extended instrumental “New World a-Comin” (named after Roi Ottley’s proto-black pride 1943 book), the title song from his musical Jump For Joy, and classic Ellington songbook numbers such as…

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As part of our daily presentation this week of several big-band shows that I did in 2005 devoted to Duke Ellington’s Treasury shows, the Tuesday “May 1945″ edition finds World War II ending in Europe, something we hear Duke Ellington acknowledge several times throughout this program in his pitches for U.S. war bonds…

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In the spring of 1945, as World War II finally began to draw to a close, Duke Ellington began “Your Saturday Date With the Duke,” a series of weekly broadcasts sponsored by the U.S. Treasury Department to promote the sale of war bonds. The sets featured classics from the Ellington songbook, pop hits of the day, obscure Ellington/Strayhorn compositions rarely or never recorded by the band, and pitches from Ellington and MCs to buy war bonds, along with occasional news bulletin interruptions. Ellington’s 1945 band, removed only a couple of years from the celebrated Blanton-Webster era…

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This September Ken Burns’ new PBS series The War will be broadcast around the country, prompting the usual media firestorm of attention that accompanies any new Burns production. Such blockbuster programs tend to leave a kind of coffeetable-book closure effect in their wake, and that effect may be even more pronounced with this particular series, given that the generation which experienced World War II is rapidly passing away. I’ll be interested to see what Burns presents about the aftermath of the war on the American homefront–the mid-to-late years of the 1940s, which seem to have been filled…

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