[On July
22, 1893, Wellesley Professor Katharine
Lee Bates first composed the words to what would become “America the
Beautiful.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy “America” and other national songs,
leading up to a special weekend post on 21C nominees for new anthems!]
On my folk music
nominee for a new national anthem.
This is perhaps not a particularly
bold position, but I have to say (as my first two posts in this week’s series
have already indicated) that both our official and one of our unofficial but
most prominent national anthems—“The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the
Beautiful,” respectively, are pretty terrible. I’m not assessing their musical
qualities, both because that’s well outside of any areas of expertise of mine
and because I don’t think that’s especially important when it comes to national
anthems. I’m not even (shockingly, for me) analyzing their lyrics too
specifically; certainly both are full of bombastic and hyperbolic moments, to
say nothing of the deeply bizarre descriptions in “Beautiful” (“purple mountain
majesties”? “the fruited plain”?), but that’s par for the course when it comes
to anthems. No, when I say that these songs are pretty terrible, I mean as
expressions of national identity.
I understand the ways in which a
flag can come to stand in for a nation, although (as I wrote in this
post on the Pledge of Allegiance) I think that such symbolism shouldn’t
necessarily become too blindly accepted or passed down. But “Banner” focuses so
fully on the flag that it has room for only the briefest and most generalizing
kinds of engagement with the nation and community for which it’s supposed to
stand—“the land of the free and the home of the brave” is a nice but pretty
vacant sentiment, not least because I have to imagine that the British soldiers
trying to take down that flag over Baltimore Harbor during the War of 1812 were
probably just as brave as their American counterparts (and of course neither
nation had yet abolished slavery at this time, so the competition for the land
of the free was likewise tight). And while I agree with the main sentiment
behind “Beautiful,” that there are lots of impressive natural landscapes under
our spacious skies, the balance of its lines falls far too fully toward those
fruited plans and not nearly enough toward the people who populate them. Again,
such problems are in many ways inevitable when it comes to national anthems,
but as Americans we do have an alternative, a national song that parallels many
of these elements but defines our core identity much more satisfactorily: Woody
Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” (1944).
The main and most frequently
reprinted verses of Guthrie’s song, which he wrote in direct response to “God
Bless America,” do focus largely on the nation’s natural landscapes and
beauties, but unlike “Beautiful” Guthrie grounds that admiration very
explicitly and powerfully in Americans’ experiences and perspectives, on two
key levels: the speaker’s own vision of the nation as he traveled throughout
it, “roamed and rambled and followed [his] footsteps”; and the song’s titular
and most repeated sentiments, that all of that beauty is ours and yours, that
it “belongs to you and me.” Within that context, the “voice” that sounds and
chants those repeated lines, while just as spiritual as “God Bless America” and
as overtly symbolic as the flag, speaks directly and concretely to these
living, breathing, wandering Americans, to the speaker and to his traveling
companion (you). Even in that most reprinted version of the song, then—the one
that ends with the “California to the New York Island” verse—America becomes
not only beautiful and symbolic but also human and communal, in the best
senses. But then there are the additional verses,
which extend and deepen that human element: the earliest known recording of the
song, a 1944
version held at the Smithsonian, includes a verse in which the speaker
steps around a sign that reads “private property” to realize that “on the back
side it didn’t say nothing”; and Guthrie’s
original manuscript for the song included two more verses, one which begins
“Nobody living can ever stop me / As I go walking that freedom highway” and the
other where the speaker has “seen [his] people” standing “there hungry … by the
relief office.” All three of these verses remind us of the stakes of a truly
communal vision of American identity, make clear that such a vision—and an
anthem that expresses it—require the fullest and bravest meanings of freedom
and democracy.
I know that the
likelihood of 35,000 people standing in unison at Fenway Park and singing about
condoning trespassing and witnessing lines at the relief office is not great.
And I’m not unreasonable, I’d be more than happy with the rest of Guthrie’s
song as the national anthem; it does everything that we expect of an anthem
while better capturing the genuinely communal and shared experience of America
that we should demand of one. Who’s up for a national campaign? After all, this
song was made for you and me. Next anthemic post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other national songs you’d highlight?
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