With Fife & Drum

Tin Pan Alley was still grinding its own powder for the war this week, but mostly its powder looked and smelled like corn meal:

> Some of the song titles: Our Glorious America, Defend Your Country, There's Millions of Yankees On Their Way, Buckle Down Buck Private.

> The flock of MacArthur songs still poured out. Among them: Here's To You, MacArthur; Hats Off to MacArthur, We've Got a Wonder Down Under. What sounded the most sincere and tuneful: Fightin' Doug MacArthur.

> Lyric Writer Bud Green had a new twist, but little else, in his On the Old Assembly Line, to Ray Henderson's music. End of the chorus:

When the overalls combine with the mighty dollar sign, There'll be miles and miles of American smiles from the factory to the mine, On the old assembly line.*

Outsiders were hard at it, too. Cinemactor Gene Lockhart, celebrating a Navy Chaplain's now-famed words during the attack on Pearl Harbor, wrote a "fighting hymn," Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition. General Manager Kent Cooper of the Associated Press tapped out America Needs You. Citizens Song had words by Louis Conyers (pen name of Mrs. Junius Spencer Morgan, daughter-in-law of John Pierpont Morgan).

No 1942 songwriter had as yet pulled as fast a one as John Golden did in World War I. His Fall In Line For Your Motherland (1916) had "lyrics by Woodrow Wilson." Ingenious John Golden had picked phrases from President Wilson's speeches, welded them into twelve stanzas, had then got the President's permission to put his name on the cover.

*Copyright 1942 by Green Bros; & Knight Inc.

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