Hiroshima in a song
Live MintOn 6 August 1945—71 years ago to the date—an American B-29 heavy bomber named Enola Gay dropped a uranium gun-type atomic bomb, with the cutesy name Little Boy, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Similar themes of divine intervention and American patriotism run through 1946’s When The Atom Bomb Fell, sung by Karl and Harty, which claims that “the bomb that struck Hiroshima / Was the answer to our fighting boys’ prayers”. Country music’s fascination with God and the atom would lead to a whole new subgenre dubbed “nuclear country”, well documented in a collection called Atomic Platters, dedicated to the first wave of songs about the nuclear age. The former song’s anxieties about the use of the atom by an unnamed evil foreshadow the US’ worries about the Soviet Union, which would soon turn into full-blown McCarthyist paranoia—leading to a succession of folk and country songs mocking or threatening Joseph Stalin and the Russians with nuclear war—best exemplified by Roy Acuff’s 1951 track Advice To Joe.
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