You're a Grand Old Flag

DESCRIPTION: Pure patriotism: "You're a grand old flag, You're a high flying flag, And forever in peace may you wave. You're the emblem of The land I love. The home of the free and the brave.... Should auld acquaintance be forgot, Keep your eye on the grand old flag."
AUTHOR: George M. Cohan (source: sheet music)
EARLIEST DATE: 1906 (source: sheet music)
KEYWORDS: patriotic nonballad campsong
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Averill-CampSongsFolkSongs, pp. 263, 269, "You're a Grand Old Flag" (notes only)
Fuld-BookOfWorldFamousMusic, 663-664, "You're a Grand Old Flag"
SAME TUNE:
She's a Grand Old Cat (Pankake/Pankake-PrairieHomeCompanionFolkSongBook, p. 108)
NOTES [252 words]: According to Fuld-BookOfWorldFamousMusic, this was originally published as "You're a Grand Old Rag." To me, that actually seems like a better reference, because it implies that the flag was actually used for something (e.g. a battle flag) that caused it to become tattered. But this was felt to be disrespectful, so the old rag became an old flag.
Thomas S. Hischak, The American Musical Theatre Song Encyclopedia (with a Foreword by Gerald Bordman), Greenwood Press, 1995, p. 406, says this "classic George M. Cohan patriotic favorite... [was] one of the first theatre songs to sell over a million copies of sheet music. Cohen wrote it for George Washington, Jr. (1906), and it was sung by the ardent title character as he battled the Anglophile Americans who were down on their own country." The original "grand old rag" reading was "based on a quote by a Civil War veteran who lovlngly called the flag a 'rag' but patriotic groups protested, so the lyric was changed after opening night and has remained 'flag' ever since. The song was performed by Joel Grey and the company in the bio-musical George M! (1968) and by the ensemble of the Broadway revue Tintypes (1980)."
Edward Foote Gardner, Popular Songs of the Twentieth Century: Volume I -- Chart Detail & Encyclopedia 1900-1949, Paragon House, 2000, p. 271, estimates that this was the third most popular song in America in 1906, peaking at #1 in June 1906 (#1 for the year being Dave Reed and Ernest Ball's "Love Me and the World Is Mine"). - RBW
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File: ACSF263Y

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