There's a Long, Long Trail

Alonzo Elliot (Composer)

Anyone who loves folk music knows that a great many of our best-loved folk songs have no known author. Somewhere somehow those songs nevertheless came to be sung by whole nations, and some though hundreds of years old, are still treasured around the world. The tune I have chosen for Sometimes a Song this week is a very special folk song indeed. It’s composer is not unknown, but he was really not a song-writer, nor had he any formal music training beyond piano lessons, common to young people of his day. Yet in the years leading up to the Great War, popular music was thriving and was building to what would become, in the United States, in particular, a period of tremendous innovation and real artistic flowering — when jazz intersected with Tin Pan Alley and gifted composers (many of them immigrants or first-generation Americans) were thrown together in ways that likely would not have happened except for the fact of the two World Wars fought only two decades apart. The composer of today’s song grew up in a culture with great popular music in the air all the time.

My husband tells me that when he was at Princeton in the late 1970’s, glee singing was still “a thing” (though certainly not as common as it was in the earlier part of the century) and that you might regularly hear students singing impromptu on campus. Whether that tradition continues, I don’t know. But at colleges across the United States after the turn of the 20th century, communal singing was as natural as breathing, wherever people gathered, whether at church, at civic events, at ball games, in school — everywhere. So in 1913, a Yale student named Alonzo Elliot, approaching graduation and planning for law school and a successful career, one night at his dormitory picked out a tune on the piano. His friend, Stoddard King, happened by, heard the tune, and suggested a first line: “There’s a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams.” Zo and his friend collaborated for a few minutes on the lyrics, and voila! So began the story of a song which was destined to become immensely popular around the world and which is still loved and sung to this day.

Even the best of the Tin Pan Alley songwriters knew that writing a song is one thing but finding a publisher quite another. Zo Elliot tried and failed to find a publisher for his song in New York. Not one publisher bit at the tune. After his graduation from Yale, Zo traveled abroad to continue his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he sometimes played his song at parties. People liked the song. In short order, a small publishing company in London heard “There’s a Long, Long Trail” and took a chance on publishing it (1914) — fearing that he would never recoup his investment. Those fears were unfounded, for Zo’s song had already begun its trip around the world, and with England’s entry into the Great War in the summer of ‘14, the sweet tune and wistful lyric appealed to both the departing soldiers and their families back home.

I’ve heard a lot of stories about this song. One English poet, John Masefield, visiting Yale in 1918, called it “the most popular song in the British Army today.” That same year, Yale awarded Zo Elliot and Stoddard King the school’s Vernon Prize for Poetry, never before given for a popular song. Alonzo Elliot recalled in letters and other reminiscences that “There’s a Long, Long Trail” enjoyed a boost of popularity in England after “a boatload of Canadian soldiers sang it coming down the Thames from a Sunday outing.” The song was on the lips of soldiers as they left for France; they sang it in the trenches; a battalion of the Middlesex Regiment sang it, as their vessel, having hit a mine, was sinking off the coast of South Africa; and it was played by a military band while the British troops were crossing the Rhine after the Armistice.

Zo Elliot didn’t write his song with the war specifically in mind, but in the war years its message touched hearts deeply, as a British lieutenant serving in the Sommes mentioned in a letter home:

Our greatest favourite [song] is one which is symbolising the hopes that are in so many hearts on this greatest battlefield in history. We sing it under shell-fire as a kind of prayer, we sing it as we struggle knee-deep in the appalling mud, we sing it as we sit by a candle in our deep captured German dug-outs.

For me the most moving of all the stories about “There’s a Long, Long Trail” was told by Sergeant Arthur Guy Empey in an article featured in the New York Tribune, on Sunday, December 23rd, 1917. (The whole article is worth reading, and is here for those who wish to look at it.) Sergeant Empey’s “Christmas Day in a Dugout” draws back a curtain briefly and shows a scene us of deep humanity from Christmas Eve, 1915, over one hundred years ago, a moment of brotherhood which crossed even battle lines, a remarkable moment from the untold history of the Great War. Empey tells his readers that the men in his unit had been saving up their rations for some time in order to have a special Christmas “feed,” and on that Christmas Eve had been taking inventory of what each had to contribute to the feast. Empey was a Yank serving with a British battalion, and he was the only one in his camp who had not received a package from home, so he was particularly lonesome, but like the other soldiers he had received a package from the Crown containing — among other things — a canned plum pudding and some American cigarettes. After the Christmas packages had been opened and the inventory taken, he tells us about something unexpected and yet very human that happened, in the most unlikely of circumstances.

Just then, Lance Corporal Hall came into the dugout, and warming his hands over the fire bucket, said, “If you blokes want to hear something that will take you home to Blighty, come up into the fire trench a minute.” None of us moved. That fire bucket was too comfortable. After much coaxing, [four of us] followed Hall out of the dugout and up to the fire trench. A dead silence reigned, and we started to return. Hall blocked our way and whispered, “Just a minute, boys, and listen!” Pretty soon, from the darkness out in front, we heard the strains of a German cornet playing “It’s a Long, Long Trail We’re Winding” [sic]. We stood entranced till the last note died out. After about a four or five minute wait the strains of “The Suwanee River” [sic] were wafted across No Man’s Land toward us. I felt lonely and homesick. Out of the darkness from the fire bay on our left a Welsh voice started singing ‘It’s a Long, Long Trail.” It was beautiful. The German cornet player must have heard it, because he picked up the tune and accompanied the singer on his cornet. I had never heard anything so beautiful in my life before. The music from the German trench suddenly ceased, and in the air overhead came the sharp crack! crack! of machine-gun bullets, as some Boche gunner butted in on the concert. We ducked and returned to our dugout.

“Christmas in a Dugout” by Arthur Guy Empey, New York Tribune, Sunday, December 23, 1917

THERE'S A LONG, LONG TRAIL

Nights are growing very lonely,
Days are very long;
I'm a-growing weary only
List'ning for your song.
Old remembrances are thronging
Thro' my memory
Till it seems the world is full of dreams
Just to call you back to me.

Chorus:
There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And the white moon beams.
There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I'll be going down
That long, long trail with you.

All night long I hear you calling,
Calling sweet and low;
Seem to hear your footsteps falling,
Ev'ry where I go.
Tho' the road between us stretches
Many a weary mile,
I forget that you're not with me yet
When I think I see you smile.

Chorus:
There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams,
Where the nightingales are singing
And the white moon beams.
There's a long, long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true;
Till the day when I'll be going down
That long, long trail with you.

“There’s a Long, Long Trail” has been recorded so often that it is difficult to choose a version to share. For Sometimes a Song, I decided on the video above to provide a chance to her the song sung by The Male Chorus of the Robert Shaw Chorale, and on the video below to give us a version by a single singer that is true to what the original releases sounded like, but a little closer to what the modern ear expects from a singer. I hope you enjoy both versions.