Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers

Suisman (history, Univ. of Delaware; Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music) connects music (and adjacent forms of entertainment) with the U.S. armed forces in all its branches, focusing on the period from the Civil War to the present. In war, music regularizes the actions of combatants, spurs recruitment through patriotism, marks time and ceremonies, and provides psychological respite from battle-readiness (including postwar rehabilitation). Suisman emphasizes that music reflects biases and values, such as racial hierarchy or empire-building in the 1890s, efficiency during World War I, and stated democratic ideals (sometimes diverging in practice) during World War II. He recounts levels of interaction with music prescribed from above or ad-libbed from below in bawdy parodies. Less-frequent group singing in the army parallels its decline for nonreligious purposes. Single-sex barracks provided opportunities for cross-dressing performances, but improvised songs still trivialized women, and racial divisions persisted. Soldiers’ unpublished anti-war lyrics in Vietnam lent oppositional agency to the rank and file. As guitars replaced pianos, memories of later conflicts recognized rock but, paradoxically, not country music. Video games assisted recruitment during the 2000s Middle East conflicts, though they portended unrealistic expectations.