Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 63

Reuben James

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the award to Topp at Wolfsschanze. By the end of the war, Topp, who had left U552 to command the 27th Flotilla in the Training Command in Gotenhafen (now
Gdynia, Poland), had the fourth highest number of ships sunk and the fifth highest
tonnage sunk (Blair, 1998, p. 813). He had also added the Crossed Swords to his
Knight’s Cross, also personally presented by Hitler in the fall of 1942.
After the war, Topp became a fisherman and an architect. He later re
joined the navy, served as chief of staff, and was promoted to rear admiral in the

Bundesmarine.
Reuben James: Music, Words, Song
Any vocal song is, of course, comprised of music and words. And al
though the song “Ruben James” is popularly attributed to Woody Guthrie, the
music, as discussed below, can be traced back to the Civil War.
In 1941, Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and Millard Lampell started the
Almanac Singers, a group (usually a trio, but sometimes a quartet or even a quin
tet) whose membership often changed from day-to-day. The group, “one of the
first urban folks-singing groups ever assembled” (Klein, 186), was generally asso
ciated with socialist, some even said un-American causes. In fact, many of their
songs were considered so anti-American that their record label, Keynote, refused
to put its name on their disks, releasing them instead under the in-house “Alma
nacs” label (Dunaway, 81). The group was also considered something of a security
threat, and an F.B.I. agent described them as “extremely untidy, ragged and dirty
in appearance” (quoted in Dunaway, 87). However, with the German invasion of
the Soviet Union, and the increasing tension between the United States and the
Axis powers, the Almanac Singers began writing war songs, the most successful
of which was Reuben James.
For Guthrie, music wasn’t simply for entertainment or listening. Rather,
music could drive a message home as easily as a newspaper or radio story:
Most songs that last the longest are the ballads that tell you a
story about the news of the day. I can’t invent the news every
day___But I can do my little job which is to fix the day’s news
up to where you can sing it. You’ll remember it lots plainer if I
can make it easy for you to sing the daily news at your job or
else at your play hours. Such as the Nazi torpedo that blew up
this famous American ship before we declared war on Hitler
and Mussolini: The Reuben James (Guthrie, 73).
After the sinking, Guthrie wrote the words to the song, and included a list
of 86 crewmen killed (Klein, 200) as listed in The New York Times: