The Ballad of Rodger Young

The Ballad of Rodger Young is an American war song by Frank Loesser, written and first performed during World War II in March 1945. The ballad is an elegy for Army Private Rodger Wilton Young, who died after rushing a Japanese machine-gun nest on 31 July 1943, and is largely based on the citation for Young's posthumous Medal of Honor.

Loesser wrote the Ballad of Rodger Young while enlisted as a private in the Army's Radio Production Unit, a unit staffed with top Hollywood talent and equipped with a dedicated orchestra, whose task it was to produce two radio recruiting shows a day. There, Loesser was charged with editing song sheets and writing songs designed to aid in recruitment. How Loesser came about to write the song is not entirely clear. There is some agreement among sources that the Army asked Loesser to write, in his daughter's words, "a 'proper' infantry song", but according to others the request came from E. J. Kahn Jr., an infantry public relations officer and friend of Loesser's.

Loesser decided to write the song about a Medal of Honor recipient, so he obtained a list of awardees and searched them for a name that would scan. After dismissing many "wonderfully unwieldy melting-pot names", Loesser found "the perfect WASP name" at the end of the list: Rodger Young. Later, when the Army mounted a publicity campaign for the song, Loesser was asked for background material. As it would not have been politic to say that he chose Rodger Young simply because the name sounded good, Loesser agreed to publish a fictitious story about how he was told of Young's musical experience by the noted harmonica player Larry Adler.

The Ballad, sung by Earl Wrightson with only a guitar accompaniment, was first broadcast in early 1945 in the radio program of Meredith Willson. The song was apparently considered unlikely to become commercially popular initially, as Burl Ives recorded it only on the B side of his hit single The Foggy, Foggy Dew. The Ballad does not appear on any charts and there is therefore no concrete evidence for its actual popularity. According to World War II veteran and historian Paul Fussell, the song "proved too embarrassing for either the troops or the more intelligent home folks to take to their hearts."

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