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about
Irving Berlin wrote this song in 1918 and Arthur Fields recorded it the same year. Berlin composed it while serving as a private in an Army training camp on Long Island during World War I. Already a well-known and successful song-writer, he was drafted at age thirty, within months of becoming a United States citizen.
Berlin was an inveterate night owl and the early hours were a torment for him. "There were a lot of things about army life I didn't like," he later recalled, "and the thing I didn't like most of all was reveille.” He wrote this song, he explained, as “a protest from the heart out.”
Well, the War ended quickly and Berlin went back to composing songs and keeping late hours. Whatever hardships he suffered at Camp Upton had been minor compared to those of his comrades who landed in Europe. These included the so-called “Lost Division” that fought defending the French Forest of Argonne in October 1918. A detachment of 679 soldiers, the greatest number from New York City, were trapped in a wooded ravine for five days under German fire before reinforcements managed to reach them. Only 252 emerged unscathed.
As a night owl myself, I love this song. But I feel a need to keep things in perspective.
lyrics
The other day I chanced to meet a soldier friend of mine.
He’d been in camp for several weeks and he was looking fine.
His muscles had developed and his cheeks were rosy red.
I asked him how he liked the life, and this is what he said:
Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning,
Oh, how I’d like to remain in bed.
Oh the hardest blow of all is to hear the bugler call.
You have to get up, you have to get up, you have to get up this morning.
Someday I’m going to murder the bugler.
Someday they’ll wake up and find him dead.
I’ll amputate his reveille and step upon him heavily,
And then spend the rest of my life in bed.
Oh, a bugler in the army is the luckiest of men.
He wakes the boys at five and then goes back to bed again.
He doesn’t have to blow again until the afternoon.
If everything goes well with me, I’ll be a bugler soon.
Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning,
Oh, how I’d like to remain in bed.
Oh the hardest blow of all is to hear the bugler call.
You have to get up, you have to get up, you have to get up this morning.
Someday I’m going to murder the bugler.
Someday they’ll wake up and find him dead.
But first, I’ll get the other pup, the guy that wakes the bugler up,
And then spend the rest of my life in bed.
Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning.
Oh, how I’d like to remain in bed.
Oh the hardest blow of all is to hear the bugler call,
You have to get up, you have to get up, you have to get up this morning.
Oh, boy, the minute the battle is over,
Oh, boy, the minute the foe is dead,
I’ll put my uniform away and move to Philadephi-ay
And then spend the rest of my life in bed.
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