Like other recent scholarship on the Second World War home front, Christina L. Baade's Victory through Harmony questions the portrayal of the war as a time of unproblematic national unity and social cohesion. The “cultural memory of the Second World War in Britain,” writes Baade, “has often cast popular music as a compliant soundtrack underscoring People's War themes of unity and shared sacrifice” (11). In contrast, Victory through Harmony argues that forms of popular music such as jazz and swing only became acceptable after significant debate and deliberation. Furthermore, in using popular music for propaganda purposes, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had to confront challenges to its own representations of wartime Britishness, including transgressive gender behavior, the “Americanization” of popular culture, and the serious consideration given to black-produced music in its programs. The job of the BBC then was not so much to unify the British by eliding these differences but rather to harmonize the disparate elements of British culture and society.

Baade begins by providing an overview of the BBC's policy toward dance music from its infancy to the start of the war; the second chapter then turns to the start of hostilities and the “Bore War,” a period that saw the BBC, for the sake of morale, lighten its musical output and initiate the Forces Program for soldiers serving in France. The next four chapters cover the period from the Dunkirk evacuation to the end of 1942, and each focuses on a particular program or musical style. Chapter 3 considers the groundbreaking program Music While You Work, perhaps the most scrutinized program in the history of BBC radio. Music While You Work was designed to boost worker productivity, particularly that of unskilled labor. Although Baade acknowledges that the program served as a “disciplinary tool,” she is more interested in how it created a sense of community among workers, both in the factory and at home, and “acknowledged subversively the dullness of a great deal of work” (81). Chapter 4 examines the impact of the war on the music profession. Despite official recognition that dance music played a role in maintaining morale, the government did not exempt musicians from conscription. Those who went undrafted had to negotiate new notions of masculinity brought on by the war. Bandleaders responded by emphasizing the importance of music to the war effort, giving concerts to soldiers, and touting the physical benefits of dancing. The subject of chapter 5 is the BBC's wartime jazz and swing program, Radio Rhythm Club. The program exposed wide audiences to jazz music and, therefore, integrated music groups. Baade convincingly argues that Radio Rhythm Club created a space for “antiracist and integrationist discourse (and more important, practice),” where the artistic value of black cultural production could be argued over earnestly (129). In its treatment of black music and black performers (e.g., the bandleader Ken “Snakehips” Johnson), the BBC showed itself to be, if not progressive, at least fundamentally liberal and decent. From jazz, Baade in chapter 6 moves to another American cultural export, crooning. In the context of the military setbacks of late 1941 and 1942, the BBC conceded to critics who regarded the music as insufficiently virile and established a committee (the Dance Music Policy Committee) to vet songs for their sentimentality or “slushiness.” Crooning was particularly problematic for the wartime BBC, because both male and female crooners pushed the boundaries of proper gender behavior. The conundrum, for the BBC, was the popularity of sentimental songs, especially among servicemen, and the lack of any broad support for the ban. Artists like Vera Lynn, now an iconic figure from the war, were simply too popular to ban, and few well-known singers were proscribed by the Dance Music Policy Committee. Chapter 7 shifts the focus from domestic broadcasting to the Empire Entertainment Unit, which designed programs for soldiers stationed overseas. Unlike the Home Service and Forces Program, the Empire Entertainment Unit employed women announcers and female crooners who represented the maternal values of “home” but added “an extra layer of glamour, reassurance, and sex appeal” (172). Baade concludes her book with a chapter on how the strong presence of American soldiers and American music in the buildup before D-Day rekindled apprehensions about dance music and the “Americanization” of British culture.

Victory through Harmony should be lauded for its presentation of the BBC as a complex institution where multiple voices contributed to programming and the meanings attached to it—“a site to contest what values, identities, and tastes were most essential to [the] nation” (5). Baade is finely attuned to racial and gendered assumptions underlying British attitudes toward dance music, leading her to many rich insights and persuasive arguments. She also makes the point that, by the Second World War, age—not class—was the key variable in determining one's taste in light music. When Baade discusses the “frenzied responses” (109) to musicians like Harry Parry (whose band was “mobbed by fans” [117] during a series of concerts in 1941), it is somewhat reminiscent of later youthful responses to popular music.

One of the challenges to writing radio and television history is that readers cannot, of course, actually hear (or see) the programs analyzed in the text. Baade begins to address this issue through a companion website that includes twenty-five audio files of key artists and songs. The samples are quite brief—twenty seconds each—but they are enough to give the listener the flavor of the performance (and all but one played without a glitch). Baade uses them most effectively when contrasting the styles of popular musicians and singers—for example, the bandleaders Jack Payne and Geraldo.

Baade's book is grounded in an impressive amount of primary source research. She has mined the archives deeply, most notably the BBC's Written Archive, and also draws on a significant amount of periodical literature (e.g., Melody Maker), where dance music, and the BBC, were carefully critiqued. Unfortunately, Baade's commendable use of the archives is not matched by a broad engagement with the historiographies of broadcasting history or national identity in Britain. The book's bibliography is thin, and Baade relies perhaps too heavily on a narrow selection of key texts.

Victory through Harmony effectively uses the BBC and popular music as a lens through which to examine the contested nature of national identity and good citizenship during the “People's War.” It makes and important contribution to media history and should be read by anyone interested in the history of popular music in Britain.