It's interesting that this was sufficient to entertain the troops. There were enough GIs who played and enough who could sing and a book of songs they all knew from memory.
I was raised that way, but many people my age and younger can't carry a tune, let alone agree on common songs. My parents were musicians, though, so there's that. Momm played the piano and even sold pianos at one point, including a lot of Steinways. Their best market was in the Midwest 25 years ago when she was selling them.
Not so surprising when you throw in enough boredom. This is the days when a pub had a dart board, pack of cards and a piano. Not a Steinway though, probably in dubious tune. Now add all that waiting on base or in camp for the mission to start, or the squadron scramble call to come. Add enough beer figure the entertainment out for yourself, then carrying the tune doesn't matter much any more. :)
There was a whole organisation devoted to entertaining personnel - ENSA in the UK - who produced shows, theatre, concerts etc, and often travelled to surprisingly near front lines everywhere the forces were, and included many famous names of the era. Course there were plenty of entertainers and stars conscripted too. There's still a modern equivalent that's organised live entertainment in the Falklands, Afghanistan, Iraq etc.
I know the US has (or had) something similar, but I forget the name.
Both Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe I believe entertained the troops, With Spike commenting in his autobiography on how hard the American Sides (arrangements) where.
It wasn't just songs they all knew from memory. There was a widely issued monthly publication, the Army/Navy Hit Kit, later the Armed Forces Song Folio, that provided them with eight pop songs and one four-part chorus arrangement per issue, with additional booklets of song lyrics for singalongs.
This is in my opinion the main reason why current music is problematic: Without the tradition of playing for, and connecting with a small live audience with a honest and heartfelt musical performance all everyone can do is imitate, from the bedroom or practice room straight in front of cameras or put in front of a manufactured audience.
Playing a song straight up is no longer possible, so performers conjure a magical moment of connection with the audience (mixing the vocals to make them sound as if an audience was singing in unison, or Maroon 5 taking the shirt off at the Superbowl halftime show) or skipping any attempt at authenticity (at the same Superbowl, the rapper driving a car around the stage, just portraying an image).
My guitar skills are quite limited, but lately I found a potential audience: should my neighbors recruit me as a babysitter for their little child, I'm going to see how my children's songs are going to work out for her. I can't imagine anything but the wildest success :-)
Outside of a few big names and events like the superbowl, that's alive and well. I can go to small local concerts more nights of the year than I care for, lots of people play in bands or instruments on their own for fun, ...
You really should edit "current music" to "current mainstream music"
There are fantastic things going on all over, people really trying to reach out & put about their own little niche scenes all over the place. In fact I had a psych band from Japan stay at mine just the other week, as they were trying to keep the costs down.
It really isn't hard to find these local scenes or the smaller more intement gigs with sites like bandcamp.
The problem that I'm describing is affecing all music: performers don't get to try out their songs in a 'natural' setting nearly as often as they used to. Music is done in the basement or in the practice room, not in the living room. Music is performed in niche scenes, not bars or dance venues with the general public attending.
I briefly googled 'psych band from japan' and saw a certain kind of photography: jaded, melancholic people on artsy album covers. The kind that I see on many event posters or in music magazines. Not terrible, but showing how disconnected music is from the real world, living in art-space.
By all means I'm not saying it's bad, and I might give it a listen.
Still, I'm going to polish up my guitar chords and maybe compose a song for my little neighbor. The way it's been done throughout human history.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that with; it eventually gets your main account banned as well.
Playing an instrument or being able to sing half-decently used to be a lot more common, because it was more valuable, and in any group of people you could depend on all of them knowing at least a few of the same songs from a set of traditional and more recent pop tunes.
For all the benefits of recorded music and film and such, it's all but killed small-scale culture. Being a 3rd-rate pianist, for instance, has gone from "fairly valuable" (not monetarily, but in a social-capital sense) to "no value at all". It's a topic Vonnegut treated a few times in his novels, notably in Bluebeard where he just digresses at the beginning of a chapter to give us his views on it more-or-less directly, through his author stand-in character (the central protagonist, in fact—that book's a kind of whirlwind tour of all Vonnegut's major topics and themes). I'd say it's akin to alienation in the Marxian sense. Probably some communication theorists have covered the territory well, but that whole field's writing's so damned (and deliberately) impenetrable that I can't say for sure.
Card and parlor games, lawn games, reading aloud from books on long winter evenings, sing-alongs around the piano, all used to be way more common than they are now. Imagine, no TV, radio's just getting started, the only films are silent and you have to go somewhere to see them, and you've got five wax cylinder recordings and can maybe borrow a few more from friends. What are you gonna do for leisure?
One of the great losses since the late 20th century (probably ending at roughly 50s or early 60s) is that due to the limited selection of radio and TV programs, even large nations like the US pretty much shared a common musical heritage. I used to be that hymns and popular songs (e.g., "the great American songbook") were shared nearly universally in the US. Today, there are ever fewer songs that are even possible for a wide cross-section of society to join in on. And the Yankees just yanked "God Bless America" based on complaints from the whiniest of racists...
I was raised that way, but many people my age and younger can't carry a tune, let alone agree on common songs. My parents were musicians, though, so there's that. Momm played the piano and even sold pianos at one point, including a lot of Steinways. Their best market was in the Midwest 25 years ago when she was selling them.