There's A Long, Long Trail A-Winding: A Song History
This World War I favorite began at Yale.[1] In 1913 two students there, Zo Elliott, who wrote the music, and Stoddard King, who supplied the words, put it together in Connecticut Hall to earn an expenses-paid trip to a Zeta Psi fraternity banquet in Boston.[1] King, whose family had moved to Spokane in 1903, spent his working life writing for the Spokesman-Review and was known for his light verse.[2] When American publishers showed no interest, Elliott, by then a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, placed the song with the small London firm West, with his mother covering half the cost; the sources consulted here differ on whether it came out at the end of 1913 or early in 1914.[1][3]
Christopher Nevinson, Returning to the Trenches, drypoint, 1916. British soldiers marching back to the front in 1916, during the war in which the song spread through the British forces; the print has no connection to the song.
Once the war began it spread through the British forces, and the poet John Masefield, hearing it sung at the Somme, called it "the most popular song in the British army today."[1] M. Witmark & Sons issued an American edition that shifted the verse's harmony from minor to major and recast the marching song as a ballad, though the song caught on in the United States only around 1917.[1] Its sheet music reached third place in national sales in March 1918, and that year Yale gave its authors the Vernon Prize, the first time the award went to a popular song.[3] Victor recorded it as a duet on September 29, 1915, with tenor Reed Miller and baritone Frederick J. Wheeler appearing under the names James Reed and James F. Harrison.[4] The tenor John McCormack followed for Victor on June 7, 1917,[5] and Enrico Caruso and Ernestine Schumann-Heink sang it at Liberty Loan rallies.[2]
The song came back in the Second World War and was heard in the 1942 film For Me and My Gal, and it has long served as a musical emblem of the Great War on screen.[3] Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra were among the many later singers to record it.[1] Folk singers have taken it up as well, among them John Roberts and Tony Barrand on their 1992 album A Present From the Gentlemen and June Tabor on her 1993 album We Died in Hell—They Called it Passchendaele.[6] Mountain dulcimer players can find it in Maureen Sellers's Simply Duets, where it appears as a melody part and a harmony part in DAD tuning among the older songs this Fingers Of Steel book arranges for two players.[7]
Sources
- Yale University Library: "Gilmore Insights - An Iconic World War I Song: There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding".
- HistoryLink.org: "King, Stoddard (1889-1933)".
- Yale University Library Online Exhibits: "They Sang and Took the Sword: Music of World War I - Sheet Music".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix B-16575. There's a long, long trail / James F. Harrison ; James Reed".
- Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor 64694 (Red Seal 10-in. single-faced)".
- Mainly Norfolk: "There's a Long, Long Trail".
- Fingers Of Steel: "Maureen Sellers, Simply Duets".
- Image: Christopher Nevinson, Returning to the Trenches, drypoint, 1916. The Cleveland Museum of Art.