Conference Agenda

During World War II, propaganda and mass media outlets were harnessed by governments at a level never experienced before in global history. For the first time, many of the realities of war were brought directly into civilian homes around the clock in real time, a result of the rise of one of the most significant communication technologies in history, radio. Advances in broadcasting technology since the First World War meant that radio programming in the 1940s could be tailored and distributed to both civilians and troops worldwide. This study will explore the U.S. government-sponsored Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS), which created programming that was unavailable to civilian listeners and broadcast only to American troops. Specifically, I will examine the AFRS program GI Jive, which broadcast American popular music and messages from home to soldiers overseas.

GI Jive was sponsored by the Army publication, YANK: The Army Weekly, a magazine that was authored by and distributed strictly to U.S. soldiers. The main draw of GI Jive was the program’s host, “GI Jill,” the pseudonym of Martha Wilkerson, who presented a character of “the girl back home” that proved extremely attractive to American troops. “GI Jill” was one of many wartime female radio personalities on both the Allied and Axis sides designed to affect troops in different ways, with Wilkerson often described as America’s response to Japan’s “Tokyo Rose,” whose purpose was allegedly to demoralize U.S. soldiers.

In dialogue with the work of scholars in radio, gender, and popular music studies such as Michele Hilmes, Christina Baade, Jennifer Fleeger, and Marilyn E. Hegarty, this study will explore the deeply personal connections soldiers cultivated with the invisible voice of Wilkerson, contextualizing Wilkerson’s position as a female radio professional in an era when the suitability and position of women in radio was deeply contested. It will also examine how YANK and GI Jive work together to create a revealing picture of the intricate and purposeful system the U.S. government created to tailor radio programming in a way that would sculpt uplifted, motivated, and ultimately successful troops.

A less-than-fortunate failing relationship, pending unemployment, fear of enlistment in the army, and sinus issues brought Leonard Bernstein to Key West in late August of 1941 for a ten-day vacation that changed the trajectory of his compositional career. While Bernstein’s successes with his “Clarinet Sonata for Piano”, Fancy Free, On the Town, and West Side Story are tied to his positionality in New England, the sunny and sailor-filled paradise of Key West, Florida also played a monumental role in Bernstein’s early career. During his visit, Bernstein started his clarinet sonata and an unfinished ballet titled Conch Town (1941)—a composition that contains the musical framework for the iconic “America” from West Side Story premiered sixteen years later in 1957. Through the live music and radio influences he likely experienced in Key West, Bernstein was able to gain exposure to Afro-Latin styles of music that inspired Cuban compositional styles in his earliest and highly successful compositions. Furthermore, Bernstein was exposed to swaths of sailors during Key West’s boom in population due to increasing tensions surrounding WWII. Sailors later served a role in Bernstein’s queer fantasies as seen in his ballet Fancy Free and musical On the Town. This paper thus examines both the sociocultural and musical landscape of Key West, Florida during Bernstein’s initial visit to the island to contextualize the importance of this short vacation to his personal and professional life. Through using resources from the Works Progress Administration of Florida, letters to and from Bernstein, biographical information about Bernstein and his early compositions, and histories of Key West and Cuban music, I curate a pastiche of sources to provide a narrative of the vibrant musical life of Key West’s in and around 1941 and its subsequent impact on Bernstein’s compositions. By examining Bernstein through the lens of Key West’s music scene as a place for cultural and historical exploration, I show the power of decentering composers from the places they are most known for. Doing so, I hope to further develop scholarship on the connections between musical ecology of place and composers toward a more globalized perspective.