Songs from the Sunken Battleships of Bloody Wars

<a href="http://www.tompkinssquare.com">Tompkins Square Records</a>

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Various Artists
Bloody War: Songs 1924-1939
Tompkins Square

After a mysterious explosion on February 15, 1898, sent the USS Maine to the bottom of Havana Harbor, killing 260 men, the ship’s captain Charles Sigsbee wrote a telegram to Washington reporting the incident. The last line read: PUBLIC OPINION SHOULD BE SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER REPORT.

Relations with the Spanish had been deteriorating, and Sigsbee wanted to prevent the US from prematurely blaming Spain for the explosion. But he must have known his request was an impossible one. At the time, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were at the height of their battle for newspaper superiority, and had already been printing sensationalized articles to fuel public animosity toward the Spanish. Sure enough, news of a Spanish attack soon filled the papers. Two months later, Congress declared war.

There has never been any definitive explanation of the explosion that sank the USS Maine. Some told it as a tale of American conspiracy. They claimed the US intentionally sank the ship, making it look like an attack in order to justify a war. Others saw it as a covert Spanish operation. In either case, the Spanish-American War became, as one 1898 song put it, “all about that battleship of Maine.”

Like each of the fifteen tracks included on Bloody War: Songs 1924-1939, a new compilation of fuzzy recordings of songs about the Civil War, Spanish-American War, and World War I, “The Battleship of Maine” (listen by clicking on the button up above) reflects the particular wartime mood from the period it was penned. Yellow journalism, conspiracy theories, patriots and warmongers provide the backdrop for a story about a soldier stumbling haphazardly through a war he doesn’t seem to understand, telling the listener that the supposed justification for his woes is the sinking of the Maine:

When they were a-chasing me,
I fell down on my knees,
First thing I cast my eyes upon
Was a great big pot of peas,
It was all about that battleship of Maine.

The peas they were greasy,
The meat it was fat,
The boys was fighting Spaniards
While I was fighting that,
It was all about that battleship of Maine.

The song, performed here by Red Patterson’s Piedmont Log Rollers, is often considered to be anti-war. But another version features a brave soldier, honored to stick his neck out for his country, oddly enough reminding us with the same refrain: it’s “all about the battleship of Maine.” That the same song would be sung by both sides seems only fitting to describe a conflict that was both justified and criticized by the public for being started over the same event.

The rest of Bloody War is shaped similarly by the idiosyncrasies of its time. There is the World War I song “The Rainbow Division” by county singers Darby & Tarlton, about life in the 42nd Infantry, which contained soldiers from so many US states that Douglas MacArthur once quipped, it “will stretch over the country like a rainbow.” And then there is the title track, “Bloody War,” By Jimmy Yates’ Boll Weevils, that tells the now all-too-familiar story of a hapless youngster going off to war (“I was a simple county boy, I lived out on the “far-um / I never even killed a flea or done nobody har-um/ Bloody war, oh bloody war”). With a short history of each song included in the liner notes, Bloody War serves as a testament to the strangeness of wars that, after listening to the album all the way through, seem, for better or worse, to be always all about the battleship of Maine.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate