“When Borne by the Red, White, and Blue”: Charles Ives and Patriotic Quotation

Building a People’s World Nation

On April 24, 1943, Charles Ives recorded three takes of his song “They Are There!” at Mary Howard Studios in New York City. “They Are There!,” subtitled “Fighting for the People’s New Free World,” is a slightly reworked version of his 1917 song “He Is There!” with text by Ives written to support American efforts in World War II.¹ In these recordings, one is struck immediately by Ives’s exuberant and energetic singing, particularly on the chorus of the song. The text of the first chorus reads as follows:

Brave boys are now in action:They are there; they will help to free the world.They are fighting for the right,But when it comes to might,They are there, they are there, they are there!As the Allies beat up all the warhogs,The boys’ll be there fighting hard,And then the world will shoutthe Battle Cry of Freedom!—(Tenting on a new campground)

While the entire song contains quotations from many popular American songs, the first part of the chorus starts with an excerpt from one particular patriotic tune that Ives belts out with passion and fervency.²

Example 1.

Ives, “They Are There!”

Example 1 shows the opening measures of the first and second choruses of “They Are There!” set to the first phrase of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” This song, also known as “The Red, White, and Blue,” is a familiar tune in the canon of Ives quotations.³ It is fitting that this particular song is used at this point and over those words; the chorus of a song is its most memorable part, and the poignant call for support of American troops as well as Ives’s hope for a “people’s world nation” where “every honest country [is] free to live its own native life” are values expressed in the original text of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.”⁴ Accordingly, the prominent placement of “Columbia,” in combination with text that alludes to the song’s subtitle—supported by Ives’s boisterous performance—creates a rousing patriotic atmosphere.

In this article, I argue that such patriotic borrowings constitute a singular stylistic category within Ives’s compositional practice. Recent discussions of Ives’s stylistic heterogeneity—the idea that his music mixes styles within the same piece, and that “strikingly different styles can even occur simultaneously”—have pointed to hymns, ragtime, and parlor songs, among others, as the most commonly recurring types of preexisting music that Ives repeatedly refers to in his works; to that list I add a patriotic style illustrated by his use of “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.”⁵ Ives constructs this style, using “Columbia” in particular, in clever musical ways across a wide variety of pieces: it can function in a subdued and understated fashion, often used to highlight a specific textual reference or evoke a memory; it can be treated as melodic source material for development by formal compositional means; and the tune can appear at a climax as a goal, referred and alluded to along the way through snippets and fragments. Furthermore, the extramusical meanings behind these borrowings of “Columbia” help to elucidate Ives’s patriotic beliefs—“patriotic” in the sense of love of one’s country. Ives espoused such fervent beliefs in both his writings and program notes.

“Columbia” and Ives

Although Ives quoted from well over a hundred different pieces, only eight tunes were used more than a dozen times, with “Columbia” being one of his favorites. According to Clayton Henderson’s tabulation in his chapter on “Patriotic Songs and Military Music” in The Charles Ives Tunebook, “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” appears in at least eighteen published and unpublished works.⁶ Not only does Ives borrow the tune over and over, but he also incorporates it into the chief melodic material of several major pieces, such as the Concord Sonata, The Fourth of July, and the Second Symphony.

“Columbia, the Gem of the...