In 1917, the year the United States joined World War I, Ives wrote six songs that seem to have a relationship to the war. A couple are explicit: "Tom Sails Away" and "They are There!" are both about the arrival of the American Expeditionary Force in France. This song addresses the underlying ideals that supported going to war, and is subtitled "and the greatest of these was Liberty."

Ives wore many hats as a composer—the experimental, the sentimental, the satiric, the transcendental—and he applied each of these aesthetics to a wide variety of song texts; but his wartime songs are invariably sincere, accessible, and nostalgic, and they reveal the extent of Ives' patriotic feeling. There is not even a hint of irony here. He sets his own text, "I think there must be a place in the soul all made of tunes of long ago," by evoking many of those tunes, including "My Old Kentucky Home," "On the Banks of the Wabash," "Dixie's Land," "The Battle Cry of Freedom," the staid hymn tune known as "Nettleton" and the revival hymn tune "In the Sweet By and By." These songs, Ives concludes, "sing in my soul of the things our Fathers loved."

Aside from the wholesale quotation of well-loved American songs, the music of this song is sweet and sentimental. Harmony is close to being that of a typical turn-of-the-century ballad, except that the tonality occasionally veers off in unexpected directions. "The Things Our Fathers Loved" was one of Ives' early songs to come to the attention of concert audiences when soprano Mary Bell included it in a Carnegie Hall recital in the 1928 - 1929 season, and attracted favorable comment.

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