The entry of the United States into World War I in April 1917 led Charles Ives away from composing (which he had done as an exhausting addition to his every-day life as an insurance agency head) and also reversed his beliefs concerning the war. He had written bitterly about the stupidity of governments and the moral cowardice of those who rushed to fight instead of bucking the war-currents and supported Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic party president who had campaigned just half a year earlier on the slogan "He Kept us Out of War." One months after the U.S.'s declaration of war and with a month yet to go before the first Yankee troops would arrive on the battlefields of Europe, Ives composed this highly jingoistic call to arms. It was written to his own text. It is a strophic song with three verses and has suggested obbligato flute, fife, or violin parts. By 1917, Ives had achieved a musical imagination that could conceive strange new combinations of sounds far in advance of any other composer. But here he stayed in a standard tonal and harmonic language, although there are unusual side-slips into strange chords and remote harmonies. Ives fully indulged another aspect of his radical style by weaving the song from no fewer than 14 different pre-existing songs and marching tunes. All his life he had understood the potential of musical allusion of this sort. Here he brings in Marching Through Georgia, Columbia, Gem of the Ocean, Dixie, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, Yankee Doodle, George M. Cohan's already popular hit Over There, Reveille, Maryland, my Maryland, La Marseillaise, Tenting on the old Camp Ground, The Battle Cry of Freedom, and finally The Star-Spangled Banner. Another part of Ives' musical personality surfaces in the words of the poem: "Fifteen years go today," begins the text he wrote himself, "A little Yankee boy marched beside his granddaddy in the Decoration Day Parade." Nostalgic references to parades and reminiscences of the Civil War are common in Ives' music, and the composer-poet definitely ties the moral crusade of the Civil War, seen as the anti-slavery conflict, to World War I, seen as the war that would result in democracy everywhere.

The chorus contains the lines, "He's fighting for the right, but when it comes to might, he is there; As the Allies beat up all the warlords! He'll be there, and then the world will shout the Battle Cry of Freedom!" (Over the word "shout" Ives directs the singer to "Yell" and at that point brings the piano to its loudest chords and powerful left-hand octaves.)

Ives was passionate about the song. He tried to get his nephew Bigelow Ives to sing it, but when the young man was not spirited or loud enough Ives would pound on the piano with both fists and demand, "Can't you shout better than that? That's the trouble with this country—people are afraid to shout!" In 1943 Ives rewrote the song as "They are There".

© All Music Guide