Of Charles Ives' more than 200 songs, General William Booth Enters Into Heaven is one of the best known, and certainly one of the most musically ambitious. The stirring song is a setting of the poem by the same name, penned by Vachel Lindsay in 1912. The poem, which became very popular and brought considerable notoriety to its author, is an ode to William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. In it, Lindsay imagines Booth marching into the hereafter at the head of a large army consisting of lepers, drunks, and other downtrodden folks, of which "each slum had sent its half-a-score the round world over." These "vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath" march as a procession in drills before the pearly gates, and, as they enter in, Jesus appears, his outstretched hand healing them of their ills.

Ives' brash musical style is a perfect match for Lindsay's uncompromising imagery (which William Butler Yeats praised for being "stripped bare of ornament"). The setting is both emotionally evocative and pictorial. At the beginning of the song, before the entrance of the singer, the piano plucks a series of dissonant chords; their strict rhythms and attacks accurately depict the bass drum to which General Booth's band marches, while the uneasy harmonies suggest the grotesquerie of the parade as described by Lindsay. In fact, Ives' musical renderings of the narrative often border on caricature, a kind of exaggeration that serves ultimately to drive home the intensely spiritual message behind the musical and poetic imagery. When the "big voiced lassies" play their banjos and work themselves into a delirium of hallelujahs, Ives' sends his singer and accompanist into a similar state of spiritual and musical fervor; likewise, the motley band of "bull-necked convicts" and "loons with trumpets" are met with a grandiose degree of musical heraldry as they march "Onward, upward, thro' the golden air!" Ives characteristically includes in his broad palette of musical materials liberal quotations from familiar musical sources. The most prominent of these is a repeated refrain, interpolated throughout the song, which is taken from the Salvation Army hymn tune known as "Fountain." The refrain, which often finds itself juxtaposed with Lindsay's most unsavory images, poses the question "Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb." These parenthetical asides poignantly highlight a familiar Christian metaphor by placing side-by-side the unsightly image of Jesus' suffering with that of Booth's weary followers. Ives further seems to revert the message outward to the listener by rendering the refrain with a sudden change of tonal orientation. This imperative is driven home when, at the end of the piece, as Booth's troops are healed and welcomed into heaven and the piano's drum beats fade into silence, the refrain appears once again as a lingering question.

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