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205 DOI: 10.7330/9780874219043.c10 10 Colonel Bogey’s March through Folk and Popular Culture Greg Kelley Frederick Joseph Ricketts, venerated as the “British March King,” stands as one of Britain’s finest composers of military music. He is touted as England’s answer to Sousa. Born in East London to a Shadwell coal merchant in 1881, Ricketts was orphaned by the age of fourteen and lied about his age in order to join the army as a bandboy. In 1904, after seven years’ service in India, he returned to England to study at the Royal Military School of Music where, surprisingly, he was ranked bottom of the class for his original march composition. In 1908 he took charge of his first band, but with the onset of World War I his bandsmen were called back to service and Ricketts found himself directing a band composed primarily of overage musicians and bandboys. In that capacity, he spent the war leading concerts for service charities and other wartime causes (Richards 2001, 428–29). After the war, Ricketts directed several military bands, transferring finally to the Divisional band at Plymouth in 1930, where he served as director of music for the Royal Marines until his retirement as a major in 1944. He was composing all the while, using a pseudonym (Kenneth J. Alford) because service personnel during this time were discouraged from developing professional careers outside the military. Of the eighteen marches he composed in the span of his active career, the best known by far is “The Colonel Bogey March,” familiar to most Americans as the theme melody from the film Bridge on the River Kwai. Alford composed “Colonel Bogey” in 1914, a portentous year for marches, to be sure. Legend has it that the original inspiration for the march 206 Greg Kelley came from an eccentric colonel whom Alford met while stationed at Fort George near Inverness in Scotland just before the war began. The composer played golf, and on the local course he occasionally encountered the colonel , whose nickname among fellow golfers was “Bogey.” Instead of shouting “fore” to warn of an impending drive, the colonel had the peculiar habit of whistling a two-note phrase, descending in the minor third. This little musical figure took root in Alford’s receptive mind—spawning the signature motif of his memorable march. When Alford penned “Colonel Bogey,” he could not have foreseen its destined fame. One authority on the bawdy folk culture of WWI, Brophy and Partridge’s The Long Trail, claims that “Colonel Bogey” was “the most frequently heard marching tune in the Army . . . whistled and hummed everywhere” (1965, 16). It was to be Alford’s masterwork and a significant commercial success. By the early 1930s, the sheet music of the march had sold more than a million copies, and the tune had been recorded countless times (Graves 1999, n.p.). Beyond licensing and recording, however, “Colonel Bogey” enjoyed a vibrant other life in parody. Early Parodies Ultimately, what permanently stamped the melody into the popular consciousness was not its commercial achievement but rather its function as a vehicle for numerous comical folk lyrics. As Jeffrey Richards observed, “[‘Colonel Bogey’s’] rhythmic structure was so appropriate for words that marching soldiers rapidly attached to it obscene lyrics, which were cheerfully sung by squaddies [British Infantry soldiers] in both world wars” (2001, 431). The catchy two-note introductory figure lends itself to bawdy disyllabic lyrics, and within a few years of its composition, the march had inspired several ditties like this one: Bullshit! That’s all the band could play, Bullshit! They played it ev’ry day Bullshit! Ta-ra-ra bullshit! Ta-ra-ra bullshit! bullshit! bullshit! Given that Alford’s marches were composed as “affirmations of his patriotism,” “tributes to the fighting forces,” and “morale boosters” (Richards 2001, 431), this stanza appears lyrically hostile to those intentions . The band is roundly berated, and then, suggestively, patriotism Colonel Bogey’s March through Folk and Popular Culture 207 is impugned as well. “Ta-ra-ra bullshit” unmistakably invokes “Ta-rara -boom-de-ay,” the song made famous by Lottie Collins, the British music hall singer who first performed it in London in the 1890s. With an accompanying dance routine, she performed the song all over London and then toured America and Australia. The song was memorialized around the world and by WWI had become shorthand for British patriotism (“A Chat” 1895; Busby 1976, 39). So, with their lyrics, British soldiers...

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