Good-bye Broadway, Hello France

DESCRIPTION: "Good-bye New York town, good-bye Miss Liberty. Your light of freedom will guide me across the sea" as the girls at home weep and worry. "Good=bye Broadway, Hello France, We're ten million strong... We're going to square our debt to you"
AUTHOR: Words: C. Francis Reisner and Benny Davis / Music: Billy Baskette (source: sheet music)
EARLIEST DATE: 1917 (music published by Leo Feist Co.)
KEYWORDS: soldier separation France | World War I
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Silverman-BalladsAndSongsOfWWI, pp. 111-113, "Good-bye Broadway, Hello France" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #46742
RECORDINGS:
American Quartet, "Goodbye Broadway, Hello France" (Victor 18335)
Peerless Quartet, Goodbye Broadway, Hello France" (Columbia A-2333)
NOTES [225 words]: The sheet music of this shows an American officer shaking the hand of a French officer across the ocean. Wikipedia says that the officers are the American commander John J. Pershing and the Frenchman is Joseph Joffre, the French commander-in-chief (who had recently been pushed out). Joffre's bulky form is clearly recognizable; Pershing is not so clear, but it could be him.
The figure of ten million American soldiers is of course absurd; while America probably had that many men who were of fighting age, far fewer than that reached France. According to Pope/Wheal, p. 491, 1.3 million Americans actually fought, with another 700,000 being shipped over too late to take part. Furthermore, American units were not as effective as British or French units of the same size, because the Americans did not have enough of all the weapons that made World War I so deadly: machine guns, artillery, tanks, and aircraft (Keegan, p. 375, says that the French supplied the Americans with 3100 field guns, 1200 howitzers, 4800 aircraft, and the Americans basically did without tanks). They did help win the war, but their intervention was not as decisive as they usually claimed.
Gardner, p. 316, estimates that this was the fifth most popular song in America in 1917, peaking at #2 in September 1917 (#1 for the year being George M. Cohan's "Over There"). - RBW
Bibliography

Gardner: Edward Foote Gardner, Popular Songs of the Twentieth Century: Volume I -- Chart Detail & Encyclopedia 1900-1949, Paragon House, 2000
Keegan: John Keegan, The First World War, Knopf, 1999
Pope/Wheal: Stephen Pope and Elizabeth-Anne Wheal, Dictionary of the First World War, 1995 (I use the 2003 Pen & Sword paperback)

Last updated in version 7.1
File: SWWI111

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