Song of the Day 6/14: James Cagney, “You’re a Grand Old Flag”

It’s Martha Ann Alito’s favorite holiday, so here’s George M. Cohan’s tribute to Old Glory, as delivered by James Cagney in his Oscar-winning turn as Cohan in the 1942 film “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” You seldom hear the tune, written in 1906 for Cohan’s musical “George Washington, Jr.,” these days unless you listen to military band music, but it was an immediate hit in its day – the sheet music was a million-seller.

Though popular with the masses, Cohan’s vaudeville-derived approach to theater and song wasn’t a hit with the critics. One sniffed,

Mr. Cohan’s personality and accomplishments are quite worth notice … consisting mainly of several bars of well-known patriotic or sentimental songs strung together with connecting links of lively and more or less original musical trash … mawkish appeals to the cheapest kind of patriotism. … Mr. Cohan is not to be blamed. In fact, from the American viewpoint that moneymaking is the test of real success, he is highly to be commended as a successful American. If he can bring himself to coin the American flag and national heroes into box-office receipts, it is not his blame, but our shame … There could be no stronger appeal for the betterment of the American stage – no fiercer commentary on the debased condition of the intelligence of a large part of the theatre-going public.

And he wrote that years before the birth of Andrew Lloyd Webber.