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Vera Lynn on Screen: Popular Music and the ‘People's War’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 July 2017

KATE GUTHRIE
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Abstract

By the outbreak of the Second World War in Britain, critics had spent several decades negotiating the supposed distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow culture, as recent scholarship has shown. What has received comparatively little attention is how the demands of wartime living changed the stakes of the debate. This article addresses this lacuna, exploring how war invited a reassessment of the relative merits of art and popular music. Perhaps the most iconic British singer of the period, Vera Lynn provides a case study. Focusing on her first film vehicle, We'll Meet Again (1942), I explore how Lynn's character mediated the highbrow/lowbrow conflict – for example, by presenting popular music as a site of community, while disparaging art music for its minority appeal. In so doing, I argue, the film not only promoted Lynn's star persona, but also intervened in a broader debate about the value of entertainment for a nation at war.

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Twentieth-Century Music , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , June 2017 , pp. 245 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2017 

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Footnotes

I am especially grateful to Christina Baade, Harriet Boyd-Bennett, Christopher Chowrimootoo, Roger Parker and Laura Tunbridge for their comments on earlier versions of this article.

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