We Meet Again for the First Time Karlovac We Meet Again for the First Time Lyrics

We'll Meet Again: how Vera Lynn'due south vocal inspired anybody from Kubrick to the Queen

The 'Forces' sweetheart' and national treasure has died aged 103. The story behind her best-known song is i of romance and British pride

Vera Lynn's We'll Meet Once more will ever remain a symbol of promise, strength and unity in a time of national crisis, having comforted those separated from their loved ones during the Second World War, and then through the global pandemic.

Dame Vera – who passed abroad today at the historic period of 103 –  has said: "I think people enjoy information technology because it speaks to the feeling of separation and the hope of reunion. Those lyrics are specially poignant with the electric current situation in our country."

Written in 1939 by popular composer Ross Parker and songwriter-cum-musical theatre impresario Hughie Charles, the lyrics continue to be cherished past and inspire generations by and present. Lynn'south death has but made them all the more powerful.

Hither they are in full:

We'll meet again
Don't know where
Don't know when
But I know nosotros'll meet over again
Some sunny twenty-four hour period

Keep smiling through
Only similar y'all always do
Till the blue skies chase
Those night clouds far abroad

And I will just say hi
To the folks that you know
Tell them y'all won't be long
They'll be happy to know
That, as I saw you get
You were singing this song

We'll meet over again
Don't know where
Don't know when
Only I know we'll meet again
Some sunny day

Lynn was the showtime singer to record it. She had been singing since the age of seven, and had already released a couple of records, just in 1939 We'll Run across Once again brought her worldwide fame.

And it wasn't simply through her music that Lynn shared a message of hope. In belatedly 1941, more than twenty per cent of the British public tuned in to her Dominicus Nighttime radio prove Sincerely Yours, in which Lynn would sing and read out letters from people separated by the state of war.

"I tried to keep people's spirits up with music", she said later, "and and then did many other performers. Nosotros likewise spent time with our families and, of grade, nutrient was sometimes very deficient but we got through it because we knew we had to."

Vera Lynn'south music became a way for parted lovers to experience they were nevertheless together, while her radio-evidence was an invaluable advice-line. Women in Britain would write to Vera to announce the condom nativity of a child to their husbands overseas. We'll Meet Again closed every episode. "Keep smiling through, / Merely like you always do," her signature song told listeners. But not anybody was smiling.

Dame Vera in 1943, as her wartime popularity reached heaven-high levels Credit: Rex

Since the Thirties, a small but song campaign had been edifice confronting "radio crooners" (a loosely defined category into which Lynn was often lumped). In 1935, The Telegraph ran an article headed "CROONING HARMS CHILDREN", alert against the "pernicious result" of this sentimental style of music. One doctor claimed that whatsoever parent who allows their child to listen to crooning "might merely as well hang their walls with indelicate pictures, [or] line their bookshelves with pornographic literature."

Soft-voiced "crooners" such as Lynn were a staple of BBC Radio's Forces Programme. Her bear witness was popular effectually the world – earning her the nickname "the Forces' sweetheart" – but there were complaints back habitation that this "effeminate" music would soften up the troops.

By 1942, the debate was filling the Telegraph letters page. "If our Armed Forces really like this sort of thing, it should be the duty of the BBC to hide the fact from the earth," wrote a reader from Bathroom. Rather than "spineless crooners" and "sentimental organists", he thought they should listen to "something more than virile".

1 retired soldier agreed. Attacking the "crooners and the other sloppy sentimental rubbish inflicted past the BBC on its listeners," he wrote that these "sickly and maudlin programmes are largely responsible for the half-hearted attitude of and then many people towards the war".

But one letter struck a more thoughtful note: "Petulant criticism of the Forces Program is like shooting fish in a barrel, [but] listening in the forces is very unlike from listening at domicile." These broadcasts were made for "communal listening under difficult circumstances. If a evidence brings soldiers together in song in the trenches, surely it doesn't also need to impress the armchair cynics dorsum in London."

Sadly, the BBC buckled under the pressure from a few loud voices. Sincerely Yours was cancelled (or as the broadcaster put it, "rested") in the spring of 1942, after merely 12 episodes. "The Sincerely Yours programmes dripped with sentiment," wrote Multifariousness'due south critic. "Afterwards a scrap they apparently dripped so much that they were dropped." In July that yr, the BBC announced a universal "crooner ban", tasking its new Dance Music Policy Committee with keeping slush off the airwaves.

But Lynn's popularity endured. We'll Meet Once again inspired a popular 1943 musical motion picture of the same proper noun, in which Lynn played a fictional version of herself – a beautiful young vocaliser who turns her talents to entertaining the British army in Europe. In 1944 the BBC brought back Sincerely Yours, bowing to the tide of popular opinion.

The tardily Vera Lynn celebrated her 100th birthday in 2017 Credit: Decca/PA

Meanwhile, Lynn continued to travel the world, performing to "the boys". Waking up one morning in 1944 in the jungles of Burma, she saw four Japanese fighters simply outside her hut. Only she wasn't agape, equally she would later remember: "I always knew I was existence very well looked later on – the boys never left my side."

We'll Run across Again remains Lynn's defining canticle, more so than fifty-fifty The White Cliffs of Dover or A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square. Although hers is the best-known version, the song is universal: it'due south as resonant coming from the London-born Lynn as from the wartime African-American doo-wop group The Ink Spots.

Listening dorsum to those early recordings, it'southward the sense of melancholy around information technology that chimes about clearly. Information technology was a hopeful vocal for a hopeless time, and has never been too far from tragedy, even after the Second World War was over.

It could hands have been the soundtrack to the end of the globe. And non just in Stanley Kubrick'south nuclear farce Dr Strangelove – although it is – but in real life, too. During the Cold War, the vocal was taken up by the the BBC'due south Wartime Broadcasting Service; in the event of nuclear Armageddon, information technology would take been ane of several pop hits played to condolement and reassure the bunker-dwelling survivors. "Nosotros'll meet again…" (Don't know when? Presumably when all that plutonium comes to the end of its 24,000-year half-life.)

Decades on from Dr Strangelove, filmmakers still acknowledge its unique power: in just the final three years it has been used in everything from Stranger Things to T2: Trainspotting to Kong: Skull Isle, in guild to summon a similar end-of-days experience. This darker, apocalyptic reading of the vocal has been used for comic upshot on The Simpsons and Futurama. Have a trip to Disneyland, and yous'll hear it played on their The Twilight Zone: Tower of Terror ride.

Its identify in our pop civilization is unshakeable: for the final episode of his talk-show The Colbert Study in 2014, comedian Steven Colbert managed to convince dozens of celebrities to join him in a rousing rendition. In the impressive skit, everyone from Barry Manilow to Kevin Spacey to Henry Kissinger to The Cookie Monster promises that the "blue skies" will "chase those night clouds far away".

But even away from the context of state of war, that bloodshot tune nevertheless carries a sense of personal sadness. One written report based on over 30,000 ceremonies revealed that We'll Encounter Again is the sixth most popular song played at funerals, just backside The Lord'due south My Shepherd.

It was the last song on the last album Johnny Cash released earlier he died. Unlike his heart-rendingly sombre encompass of Trent Reznor'due south Hurt, here the 71-twelvemonth-one-time'south voice is rich with warmth and humour. For the second verse, he doesn't sing. He speaks. The words get a repose, intimate message, not lyrical simply down-to-world. "Yeah, we'll run into over again… So, honey, keep on smilin' through." It's like beingness transported back to an episode of Sincerely Yours, listening in to the last letter of a long dead soldier. The vocalism outlives the speaker.

This touch on of the tragic is what makes the vocal so haunting. "I know we'll encounter again" is a promise no-one tin can keep. Bombs fall, houses crumble, people disappear. The words may look ahead to a brighter future, simply the tune behind them is laced with doubt. That brave smile could crevice into tears, but it never does. Despite it all, with only the near imperfect, hesitant hope – "don't know where, don't know when" – she keeps singing. The world and the tape continue to spin.

It'south a fragile song, uncertain, and notwithstanding it endures in one piece – like fine china passed from hand to hand across the years. In this age of digital mail-product, it'south remarkable to think that information technology was recorded straight onto wax in a single accept. As Lynn told The Telegraph in 2014: "If the trumpeter cracked on the last note, you lot had to practise it all over again. You had to make certain your have was perfect." It was. It still is.

• Read Telegraph readers' tributes to the tardily Dame Vera Lynn

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Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/meet-vera-lynns-song-inspired-everyone-kubrick-queen/

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