A war song is a musical composition that relates to war, or a society's attitudes towards war. They may be pro-war, anti-war, or simply a description of everyday life during war times.
It is possible to classify these songs by historical conflict: "First World War songs", "Second World War songs", "Vietnam War songs", and so on. There is also a miscellaneous category of recruiting songs, anti-pacifist songs, complaints about mess rations, excessive drilling and so on. Many national anthems are either a call to arms, or a celebration of military victories and past glories. There were a handful of anti-war songs before 1939, but this category has grown enormously since the start of the Vietnam War. On the other hand, new songs that are pro-war are becoming less common. Some national anthems have been adapted to be purely instrumental, or less bellicose in sentiment.
Li Cunxu
Li Cunxu was a Chinese king who made war songs for his troops.
Haka
It is not known when the Māori first saw fit to compose the combination song and dance known as the Haka. The haka is generally composed by a chief, or high-ranking warrior to build up the spirits of warriors and their tribe, whilst striking fear into the enemy. The most famous Haka was composed by Te Rauparaha, the chief of Ngāti Toa, a tribe based in the lower North Island. Te Rauparaha was known to Māori and early Europeans as "The Maori Napoleon," and his Haka, Ka Mate, was a dance and ode to both the living and the dead. It is still in use today, and is regularly performed by international sports teams from New Zealand, including the All Blacks rugby union team.
Early military campaigns
In England songs about military and naval subjects were a major part of the output of ballad writers from the 16th century onwards. Most of these fell into two groups, those that lamented the cost of war for the participants, and which can therefore be seen as early protest songs and those that were generally patriotic in nature and often veered into propaganda. Narrative descriptions, which had an important function in distributing news before the development of modern newspapers, have not into both camps, occasionally at the same time.
One of the earliest British ballads is "The Ballad of Chevy Chase", which exists in several versions and deals, somewhat inaccurately, with the events of the Scottish victory of the Battle of Otterburn in 1388 and may have been written in the early 14th century, but the earliest surviving version is from the mid-16th century. Stress is put on bravery, honour, revenge and the costs of war. This last factor is even more evident in an early 17th-century version that notes that 'the next day did many widows come/Their husbands to bewail.'
The conflicts between England and Spain in the later 16th and early 17th centuries produced a number of ballads describing events, particularly naval conflicts like those of the Spanish Armada. The English Civil War (1642–1653) produced a subgenre of "Cavalier ballads", including "When the King Home in Peace Again", while their parliamentarian opponents were generally happier singing metrical psalms. Many of these were adapted and reused by Jacobites in England and Scotland after the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688, a tradition built on by Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott.
The Anglo-French Wars of the 17th and 18th centuries saw more descriptive works, usually couched in patriotic terms, but some, like 'Captain Death' (1757) dealt with loss and defeat. As regimental identities emerged songs were adopted for marching, like 'The British Grenadiers', based on a dance tune and with enthusiastic lyrics from at least the mid-18th century. Both sides make extensive use of ballads as propaganda in the American Revolutionary War (1775–83), but they became a flood during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1797–1815). The same period saw numerous patriotic war songs, like 'Heart of Oak' and the emergence of a stereotype of the English seaman as 'Jolly Jack Tar', who appeared in many ballads.