Sincerely Yours, Vera Lynn:" Performing Class, Sentiment, and Femininity in the "People's War"
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"Sincerely Yours, Vera Lynn:" Performing Class, Sentiment, and Femininity in the "People's War" Christina Baade, McMaster University, has published or Dame Vera Lynn is iconic in the cultural has forthcoming work on American klezmer and popular memory of World War II as a good "People's War" for music broadcasting at the wartime BBC, including a Britain, in which people united across class lines, women chapter in Floodgates: Technologies, Cultural Ex/change moved unproblematically into supportive roles for men and the Persistence of Place and an article in Popular in the services, wartime separations heightened romance, Music. This paper relates to her current book project, and morale never wavered. Her "reassuring" voice, "Victory Through Harmony': The BBC, Identity, and sympathetic persona, sentimental repertory, and Popular Music in World War II." symbiosis with the media of radio and recordings all contributed to her phenomenal wartime popularity and Abstract sobriquet as "No. 1 Sweetheart to the Forces"; in many Vera Lynn embodies nostalgic constructions of World ways, her singing functioned as a supportive soundtrack War II as a good war. Though phenomenally popular, during the war and in its memory. The nostalgic her radio performances inspired debates over construction of Vera Lynn's performances as sentimentality and women's voices on air. This article "soundtrack" for the British war effort obscures, examines how her performances enacted national however, their cultural work in the wartime discourses wartime values while provoking controversy and argues surrounding class distinction, national identity, and that even "compliant" cultural production does gender roles. It fails to explain how her performances so important political work. potently enacted national values in wartime and why she Résumé elicited such passionate fandom and vitriolic critique. Vera Lynn exprime les interprétations nostalgiques de la Lynn's wartime radio performances, especially deuxième guerre mondiale comme étant une bonne in the series Sincerely Yours - Vera Lynn, are ideal sites guerre. Quoique sa popularité fut phénoménale, ses to address these questions because of the ways that her séances à la radio inspirèrent des débats sur la mastery of radio's tension between individual and mass sentimentalité et sur la voix des femmes sur les ondes. address contributed to the British Broadcasting Cet article étudie la façon dont ses performances Corporation's (BBC) wartime aim "to maintain national représentaient les valeurs sentimentales durant la guerre unity and to secure the nation's morale" (Nicholas tout en provoquant une controverse et dénote que même 1996, 2). Radio was central in Lynn's career; she une production culturelle “accommodante” accomplit un explained, "Live broadcasting over the BBC was for me travail politique important. the link, the point of my most intimate contact with the people" (1975, 148). Despite its wartime concern with 36 Atlantis 30.2, 2006 PR www.msvu.ca/atlantis providing morale-boosting "entertainment and diversion" of her lengthy career. It has ignored not only her (Briggs 1995, 75), the BBC was deeply ambivalent about pre-war achievements but also her success throughout Lynn's on-air presentation, singing style, and broader the post-war era: she topped the American and British star persona, particularly the ways in which they pop charts with songs including "Auf Wiederseh'n, referenced the troubling category of the sentimental. This Sweetheart" in the 1950s, hosted television series in the paper examines three aspects of Lynn's wartime cultural 1950s, 60s, and 70s, and toured extensively in Australia, work: the corporeality of her voice including the pre-war Scandinavia, and the Netherlands. In her 1975 "pedagogies" of working class club and dance band autobiography, Lynn expressed ambivalence about her performance that shaped it, her location within the BBC close association with the war in popular memory: "If and its institutional commitment to morale-building it makes me unhappy to come across people who persist entertainment, and her situation within discourses of in thinking of me only in connection with this period, total war, class, femininity, and the sentimental. In and in particular with those broadcasts, from the point doing so, I argue for understanding even seemingly of view of my personal success and (unintentional) compliant cultural production as sites of negotiation and influence, this was the peak time of my professional life, political work. I suppose" (101). Both narrative and performative reasons have Vocal Codes contributed to Lynn's status as nostalgic icon. Like many In this section, I examine the grain of Lynn's other successful female singers, Lynn has been excluded voice and excavate the performative "pedagogies" that in the narratives of post-war popular music, which tend made her so central in the war and its remembrance. to focus on rock and roll and its values of innovation, Roland Barthes described the "grain of the voice" as masculinity, and white youth consumption of "the materiality of the body speaking its mother African-American music. Moreover, Lynn did not adapt tongue": particular voices conveyed both a corporeality easily as a performer; she possessed a narrow "technical and a close relationship with language (1977, 182). and emotional range" and selected only repertory that Although Lynn came to have a special affinity with the suited it. When popular music incorporated rock disembodied soundscape of radio broadcasts and elements in the late 1950s and early 1960s - when, recordings, her autodidactic approach to singing and according to Lynn, rhythm was emphasized over "strong interpretation was rooted in the live performance melodies" and lyrics with "some logic" - she had traditions of her working class childhood, which she difficulty finding suitable new songs (1975, 94; 179). later adapted to encompass the microphone, dance band, Her repertory choices thus enacted nostalgia while her and American commercial music. My aim in offering this performances evoked memories of wartime listening, prehistory is to decode her performance style and voice especially for European listeners, Allied veterans, and the as hybrids of the past and modernity, British working British. Lynn's symbiosis with sentimental wartime songs class sensibilities and popular mass culture; Lynn's tied her inextricably to the Second World War, but she wartime importance was inseparable from her pre-war located her sentimental grounding in childhood, when development as a performer. she honed her approach to performance. The nostalgic construction of Lynn as Growing up in working class East London as emblematic of the British war effort has obscured most Vera Welch, Lynn became involved in music at an early www.msvu.ca/atlantis PR Atlantis 30.2, 2006 37 age. Her family was comprised of enthusiastic singers, an invitingly strong and vibrant chest voice. Since she whose activities spanned "sing-song parties" at home, did not employ her upper register, her range in wartime visits to professional music halls, and active involvement recordings was small (g to b-flat', a little over an in Working Men's Clubs (Lynn 1975, 12-14). The clubs octave) or, more accurately, average. Lynn sang in a provided an affordable alternative to pubs, serving as comfortable range for untrained singers, a valuable social gathering places during the week and offering quality with the importance of participatory singing in Sunday concerts (i.e., variety shows by semi-professional working class culture. Indeed, a recurrent trope in her entertainers) (Hoggart 1957, 125). Lynn was taught to wartime films was the sing-along, in which her solo sing at age two by her Uncle George, who performed at voice rose above a chorus of soldiers, factory workers, the clubs impressions of the music hall star George evacuated school children, or benefit audiences (Wellesley Robey; almost as a matter of course, Lynn progressed to 1943). A thrilling timbre and heartfelt declamation of performing in the club circuit at age seven (Lynn 1975, song lyrics, rather than virtuosic range or technique, 11-13; 21). rendered Lynn's voice extraordinary. From childhood, Lynn's voice existed in tension While her voice's untrained quality, accessible between the natural and unnatural. The wartime press range, and unusual timbre represented continuity admiringly described her as a singer without formal between Lynn's childhood and wartime careers, her voice training, and Lynn described her interpretations as and performance style underwent a significant motivated by instinct: "from my earliest days I seemed performative (not biological) shift in adolescence. After to be attracted naturally to the straight-forward eight years on the club circuit, Lynn made the transition sentimental ballad....And I've always been able to decide to dance band singing: "I appeared with Howard Baker's quickly how to sing a song, how to phrase it, what to Band at 16, Billy Cotton's at 17, first broadcast with emphasize." Her voice was from childhood "distinctive Joe Loss at 18, and later with Charlie Kunz over a in some uncanny way"; it was "loud, penetrating, and period of 18 months, then joined Ambrose who I have rather low in pitch for my age" (Lynn 1975, 21; 24-26) now been with for over 3 years" (Lynn 1940). She According to the teacher in a much-repeated account of progressed rapidly through the dance band ranks, from Lynn's only encounter with formal training, it was an the local "gig king" Howard Baker to Ambrose, whose untrainable "freak" voice (Unsigned 1942a). A more band was regarded as the best in Britain. Lynn had to feminine, though less lucrative, singing voice existed change her approach to performance: rather than acting alongside Lynn's "Other" voice, however. At school, the out her songs, as she had done as a child, she learned children's music was pitched too high for Lynn's usual to stand still in front of the band while she sang and performing voice, forcing her into a "disastrous" "kind remain respectfully to the side at other times.