Patriotic Songs – 7

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America, American Tune, history, music, patriotic songs, Paul Simon, social comment

(Photo from the Library of Congress)

Independence Day approaches, so it’s time to think about patriotic songs again. In the past, I’ve written about “America, the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and others. So it’s definitely time for an update.

I wrote earlier that I preferred “America, the Beautiful” to “The Star-Spangled Banner” as our national anthem, partly because of its singability and partly because of its tone. It’s a celebration of America in all its variety and thus appropriate for all times, while “The Star-Spangled Banner” is a battle song, more suitable for wartime spirit-rousing than for reflection on our blessings. (In a future post I’ll write about America’s other great battle song, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”). In our current turmoil over public symbolism, Francis Scott Key’s checkered history as a slaveowner who also criticized slavery has made him a problematic figure, similar to Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and a great number of important historic figures whose past deserves re-examination. I doubt if “The Star-Spangled Banner” will ever lose its place at ball games and public events, though, now that it’s ingrained in people’s minds, so I’ll let that debate pass.

A friend of mine used to say, only half-joking, that Paul Simon’s “American Tune” should be our national anthem, as it reflected the American spirit nowadays a lot better than the songs from the 19th Century do. I’d like to think a little about “American Tune,” because it confronts us with the question of what a patriotic song is, and what it isn’t.

“American Tune” was written in 1972 and released in 1973, and Simon told an interviewer that it was written in response to the re-election of Richard Nixon. The tune was taken from Bach’s setting of “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded” from the St. Matthew Passion, a melody that has been used for other songs over the years, notably “Because All Men Are Brothers,” which was on an early album by Peter, Paul, and Mary. The lyrics are, in my opinion, among Simon’s best. They combine his penchant for surreal imagery with direct and emotional statements, and they convey a sense of weariness combined with resolution that we can all appreciate.

The song begins with a sense of defeat: souls battered, dreams shattered, friends ill at ease. But that sense is tempered by reassurance: “It’s all right,” the chorus reassures us, although just what “all right” means is rather subdued. It’s all right because we lived so well so long, and it’s all right because you can’t be forever blessed: not exactly words to march into battle with. The song’s most memorable moment, the one that everyone remembers, comes in the bridge section. The speaker has had a dream. I dreamed I was dying, he says, but this dream is all right, for his soul looks down and smiles reassuringly. Then I dreamed I was flying, and this time when he looks up, he sees “The Statue of Liberty / Sailing away to sea.” Liberty itself has fled the scene.

The final verse sums it up:

We come on a ship they call the Mayflower

We come on a ship that sails the moon.

We come in the age’s most uncertain hour

And sing an American tune.

Is it a patriotic song? Of course it is. It expresses deep feelings of loving concern about the country, at a time when “love it or leave it” was a popular slogan. As we reflect on our history today, with renewed examination of our under-told stories, our under-examined monuments, and the challenges posed by our historic symbols and slogans, we owe it to ourselves that patriotism doesn’t rule out criticism and love of country mustn’t blind us in those moments when the Statue of Liberty appears to have sailed away.

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Patriotic Songs – 6

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marches, memory, music, patriotic songs, South Iron High School

When I was in high school, our music teacher for a couple of years was an intense, strange, rather scary man who was also a preacher of some sort. Looking back on it now, I think there might have been something genuinely wrong with him. He had very little emotional control, losing himself in rapture at the music we were playing (or the version that was playing in his head, anyway; we were not particularly musical) or flying into fits of rage whenever kids got under his skin, which was often.

This teacher had two musical passions: old-time gospel music and Sousa marches. He selected far more gospel music than was appropriate for a public school, even in those days, and would close his eyes and sing in bliss as we squawked out the tune. Even the pious among us probably realized something was off about the level of his religious fanaticism as we marched down the street at the regional band festival playing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” But Sousa marches! Now there was something we all could embrace, even the rowdy saxophonists who otherwise lived only to torment our unbalanced band director with sotto voce sarcasm. The teacher’s favorite was the “Washington Post March,” which you don’t hear as much nowadays, but we students preferred the one that you will undoubtedly hear today, July 4, if you watch a fireworks show, listen to an Independence Day concert, or simply keep your ears open as you hit the stores: “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

“The Stars and Stripes Forever” is written in military march form, in which separate sections called “strains” can be repeated, recombined, and re-sequenced to meet the needs of the situation. If the band is actually marching, for example, the first and second strains can be repeated as many times as needed until the band reaches the reviewing stand, at which time the leader will undoubtedly head for the famous Trio/Grandioso strain that finishes the march, the one we all remember with that crazy piccolo flying up into the sky.

John Philip Sousa, the march’s composer as well as its popularizer, was not just a fine musician and composer; he was also a shrewd businessman. He recognized the potential of recorded music very early and made sixty recordings with the Marine Band during his time as its leader, bringing fame to the band and to himself, before leaving it to start the Sousa Band. Although Sousa was known as “the American March King,” the Sousa Band was emphatically not a marching band; our friend Wikipedia records only eight times that the band actually marched during its forty-year history. The Sousa Band can be found performing at practically every notable event and celebration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where it performed at the opening. By that time “The Stars and Stripes Forever” had become one of its signature pieces, as it was practically an instant hit after its composition in 1896-97.

Sousa also wrote lyrics for the march, although I’d have to describe them as unremarkable. They’re full of patriotic sentiment but not especially original; lots of “the gem of the land and the sea” going on here, filling out lines to match the tune. If you grew up watching Mitch Miller on TV, as I did, you’ll remember the nonsense lyrics better. “Be kind to your web-footed friends . . . ” What makes “The Stars and Stripes Forever” memorable is its grand and stirring music, and that’s all right. We don’t always need words to make us feel patriotic.

Speaking of patriotism, after that band director got fired or left on his own (who knows which?), the school hired a young music teacher, fresh out of college, who actually knew a thing or two about music and played a mean trumpet. He had gone to college after serving in the Army, where his trumpet skills had earned him an assignment to one of the several music ensembles that the Army maintained to entertain troops, play at events, and generally put forth a more humane face to the world than tanks and machine guns. And thus he had found himself out of the line of fire during that time, when the Army was engaged in a full-scale war in Vietnam. I remember him telling me as graduation approached to keep practicing my trombone in case things went sour and the draft was reimposed. “You’ll want to play that horn, trust me,” he said, or something like that.

 

 

 

Patriotic Songs – 5

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America, America the Beautiful, Katharine Lee Bates, music, patriotic songs, Ray Charles, Samuel Ward

I’ll admit to being an unabashed fan of “America the Beautiful” and a proponent of the idea that it should replace “The Star-Spangled Banner” as our national anthem.

It’s singable, for one thing. Ordinary people can carry the tune without having to strain, or resort to the kind of godawful screeching we sometimes hear nonmusical people engage in when they attempt the national anthem. For this we have to thank Samuel Ward, the composer, an experienced musician and organist for the Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, who clearly knew how to build a tune that could be managed by ordinary folks while still building drama. Sadly, Ward never got to experience the success of “America the Beautiful”; the tune he wrote in 1882 was not matched with the lyrics until 1910, seven years after his death.

Samuel A. Ward

The poem that was to become known as “America the Beautiful” was written by Katharine Lee Bates, and it first appeared in The Congregationalist, a denominational magazine, in 1895 under the title “Pikes Peak.” It was written in the summer of 1893, after Bates, a professor of English at Wellesley College, had traveled by train to Colorado Springs for a summer teaching job and then ridden with friends to the top of Pikes Peak. On her train trip, Bates had stopped at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago (thus the “alabaster cities”) and had, of course, seen amber waves of grain and purple mountains’ majesty, among other things. The poem was reprinted in the Boston Evening Transcript in 1904, a music publisher matched it with Ward’s tune in 1910, and the rest is history.

Katharine Lee Bates

Bates kept reworking the poem after its initial publication, smoothing out lines and looking for better images (that fruited plain was initially an “enameled” plain, a line that truly goes “clunk” with that extra syllable squished in). But the essential structure of the four verses remained the same.

The first verse celebrates America’s beauty, and that’s the one we sing most often. But I think most of us are aware of the other verses, even if we can’t quite remember them. The second verse celebrates its founding ideals, the third verse honors its military heroes, and the fourth verse looks forward to the future. But what I especially like about this song is that none of those verses is unthinking or simply self-glorifying. Each of those ideals is presented in a moral framework. For example, in the second verse, the “pilgrim feet” that “a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness” are celebrated, but then Bates reminds us that freedom shouldn’t be unlimited: “Confirm thy soul in self-control, / Thy liberty in law.” And the military victories of the third verse are good as long as “all success be nobleness / And ev’ry gain divine” – in other words, for liberation and self-defense, not for glory or conquest.

“America the Beautiful” is a great patriotic song, proud but not boastful, celebratory but not unquestioning. There are a lot of great versions out there; many people like Ray Charles’ soul rendition, and although I’ve never been a huge Ray Charles fan, who am I to say they’re wrong? That’s America for you.

 

 

Patriotic Songs – 4

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America, flag, George M. Cohan, James Cagney, patriotic songs

James Cagney as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy

July 4 is about the only day most of us hear “The Yankee Doodle Boy,” which is more often called “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and our hearing it comes mainly from the 1942 film Yankee Doodle Dandy, in which James Cagney portrays George M. Cohan, the song’s author. It’s not high art, this song, but it’s worth reviewing if for no other reason than the mythology it incorporates. And besides, it’s irresistibly catchy!

The song comes from a 1904 Broadway musical written by Cohan, Little Johnny Jones. Very loosely based on the exploits of Tod Sloan, one of the most famous jockeys of the day, the musical tells the story of an American jockey who rises to fame and then travels to England, where he rides a horse named Yankee Doodle to victory in the English Derby. Thus the line in which “Yankee Doodle came to London just to ride the ponies” makes sense within the musical although most of us scratch our heads over it nowadays. (In real life, sadly, Sloan’s venture in the Derby ended in tragedy, when his horse inexplicably pulled up, broke its leg, and had to be put down.)

Today we only hear the chorus, which is oddly repetitious, repeating “Yankee Doodle” six times. Here are the lyrics of the verses, taken from Wikipedia:

Verse 1

I’m the kid that’s all the candy, 

I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,

I’m glad I am,

So’s Uncle Sam.

I’m a real live Yankee Doodle,

Made my name and fame and boodle,

Just like Mister Doodle did, by riding on a pony.

I love to listen to the Dixie strain,

I long to see the girl I left behind me;

That ain’t a josh,

She’s a Yankee, by gosh.

Oh, say can you see,

Anything about a Yankee that’s a phony?

Verse 2

Father’s name was Hezikiah,

Mother’s name was Ann Maria, 

Yanks through and through.

Red, White and Blue

Father was so Yankee-hearted,

When the Spanish war was started,

He slipped on a uniform and hopped upon a pony.

My mother’s mother was a Yankee true,

My father’s father was a Yankee too:

That’s going some,

For the Yankees, by gum.

Oh, say can you see

Anything about my pedigree that’s phony?

In the first verse, Little Johnny Jones combines North and South; although he identifies as Southern by loving the strains of “Dixie,” his girl is a Yankee, i.e., a Northerner. In the second verse, he combines Jew and Gentile; his father’s name is distinctly Old Testament, while his mother’s “Ann Maria” is about as Catholic as they come. Thus Johnny Jones is a thoroughly mixed-blooded American, who travels to Old England to both charm and vanquish the stodgy Old-Worlders.

The somewhat naive braggadocio of Johnny Jones, who proclaims himself “all the candy” (that is, he’s hot stuff) lines up with American folk heroes from Paul Bunyan to Mike Fink to Muhammad Ali. But in identifying himself as the amalgam of geographies and cultures, he also reminds us of the American ideal of inclusiveness and incorporation. And the bouncy tune is as hummable as they come, like Cohan’s other great songs, such as “Harrigan,” “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and “Over There.”

Here are links to my earlier appreciations of patriotic songs: “God Bless America,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and, less appreciatively, “God Bless the U.S.A.”

Patriotic Songs – 3

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art, music, patriotic songs, Veterans Day, writing

I missed posting this for Veterans Day, but want to catch up a little bit. “God Bless America” was introduced on Armistice Day in 1938, although it had been written twenty years earlier. The composer and lyricist, Irving Berlin, thought of it as a “peace song,” which makes more sense when you read the intro lyrics, generally omitted today but which Kate Smith always insisted on including:

While the storm clouds gather far across the sea, let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free,

Let us all be grateful for a land so far, as we raise our voices in a solemn prayer…

“God Bless America” used to irritate me, when it got appropriated by Christian conservatives as a sort of alt-National Anthem, but it doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. The lyrics, always Berlin’s weakest side, are still corny and trite; the tired trotting out of mountains-prairies-oceans is lazy, and since when are oceans “white with foam”? Only when there’s been an environmental disaster, I suppose. But you have to give the song credit for great singability and the masterful pop-song flow that rises to a high note and forte on that last “God.” It’s a well-built tune.

The only thing that irritates me nowadays about “God Bless America” is the air of faux piety with which people sing it. It’s a song that I wish could be put in a vault for a couple of decades, and then brought out again when it could be experienced fresh, without the layers of sanctimonious muck that have accreted on it over the years.

For more of my thoughts on patriotic songs, check here and here.