Korea Blues

 Korea Blues was recorded and released by Chess in 1951, as many American soldiers were dying in South Korea.
The Korea war saw a classic ‘Cold War’ dynamic where the United States intervened in South Korea after an invasion of the country a few days earlier from the North Korean communist regime, who was supported by Stalin. First referred to as a police action by the then president H.S. Truman, it was in fact, a military one. It is estimated that there were 33,686 U.S. deaths during the war.
The song is often referred to as the “Forgotten” or “Unknown” war, for the lack of public attention that it received, especially in relations to the wars that preceded (World War II) and succeeded it (Vietnam War). Lenoir was one of the few musicians to acknowledge the war in one of his songs. ‘Korean Blues’ is actually the first song about the Korean war where Chinese are mentioned. When China intervened in the war in 1950, it was a complete surprise for the U.S. military, who were not expecting this. It was the first and last time that China and U.S. went to war. Professor Robert Farley wrote “The legacies of this war remain deep, complex and underexamined. Memory of the Korean War in the United States is obscured by the looming shadows of World War II and Vietnam. China remembers the conflict differently, but China’s position in the world has changed in deep and fundamental ways since the 1950s.”
The Korean war materialised the frustration, tensions, and political interests that existed between East and West during the Cold War. Korea was simply a stage.
Written as a letter from a U.S. citizen who has just received a letter from the government to go and fight, Korean Blues carries the burden of many young men of the time. Leaving his woman behind, and killed in battle, the soldier’s main worry is who his lover will replace him with, and how she will deal with life without him.
It is a romantic song that offers the human perspective of war, and the impact it has on human life. In his book ‘The Truman and Eisenhower Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs’, Guido Van Rijn talks about the message in the song “ J.B. Lenoir recorded a fatalistic song, in which death in action is combined with the specter of the Jody back home”.