ABSTRACT
During the First World War in America, signifiers of masculinity worked through sheet music in various ways to shape ideas of manhood in the face of the greatest war ever experienced. When the Wilson administration declared war on Germany in 1917, the sheet music discourse of manhood and a soldier’s identity changed with the need to train millions of men to fight in war-torn Europe. I note the shift from the American nineteenth-century ideal of ‘manliness’ to one of ‘masculinity,’ a more physically engaged and active idea of manhood, and I explore how we can understand this shift from different characterizations of manhood in popular song. Songwriters composed songs about soldiering, comparing different soldiers’ masculinity in songs. Differences between the characters portrayed and the musical style of the songs illustrate the ways that musical practice cemented characteristics of the proper masculinity of the soldier. Shifts of ideas within a broad discourse, such as manhood, are never smooth and the songs attest to the complexities of the changing gender ideas. Song leaders’ singing practices and rhetoric described in their newsletter Music in the Camps (1917–1919) underscore the impact of the singing of these songs on the troops in their charge.
