The Amazing Grace of Two Great American Songs

This week I cannot bring myself to write about anything small. History is standing over us all, well-dressed and important, demanding that we bring ourselves to the party and offer something more that the usual. So this week, I offer a tale you may not know, a tale of two American songs. Both are iconic, and both are infused with the passion and spirit of an age charged with destiny, with danger and undeniable import. Not unlike our own age. 

Of course we all know that Frankie Scott Keyes stood on a ship a couple of hundred years ago and jotted down a little poem about a battle he was watching, which became the lyrics to our own national anthem. But Frankie was no Bob Dylan, or even Neil Sedaka, and the words to our national anthem are almost as difficult and obscure as the British drinking song from which the anthem takes its unfortunate melody -- a roller coaster ride of a tune, which has given far too many singers far too many show-off opportunities to pound hard on that money note at the end, while the rest of us pretend to sing it, grateful no one is really listening. One can understand why the melody is a drinking song -- a few stiff ones are necessary tackle that tune with anything like confidence.

But we have other tunes in the "let's celebrate America" songbook. And two of my favorites are "God Bless America," and "This Land Is Your Land." The stories behind these songs are as remarkable and American as the very songs themselves. And they are also, always and forever, joined at the hip, though most people don't know it.

Here's the deal. In the year 1918, a young man named Israel Baline lifted a melodic line from the vaudeville tune "Mose With His Nose Leads the Band" and put together a tune called "God Bless America," for a revue called "Yip, Yip Yaphank." It included the lyrics "stand beside her, and guide her, to the right, with a light from above." But the tune didn't really fit the show, so it got filed away. When Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party began its rise to infamy in 1938, the young man, who by now was named Irving Berlin, rewrote the tune (including the line "to the right," changing it to the less political "through the night"), and a great American anthem was born. To seal the deal, a singer named Kate Smith recorded it, and it became a huge national hit. It was played everywhere -- on the radio, at ballgames, in the newsreels before movies -- you couldn't get away from the song, or Kate Smith's very powerful (and, to some ears, highly annoying) vocal fireworks. A movement was born to make this song the national anthem.

Meanwhile, by the year 1940, a young songwriter/singer/all-around-troublemaker named Woody Guthrie decided he had heard quite enough of this song. He was not moved by the lyrics, thought them too passive and too religious. America, Guthrie believed, was a muscular land of people doing things, making things happen, not sitting around singing songs of gratitude for rights and blessings they passively received. So Woody, being Woody, sat down and wrote his own song about America. And unlike Irving Berlin, Woody didn't need a Kate Smith to take it on. He just strummed that guitar of his (with the sticker on it that said "this machine kills fascists"), and drawled out those words himself. It, too, became a huge hit, and another movement was born to make this song the national anthem. 

That these two songs were candidates for the new national anthem says quite a bit about both tunes, but it says even more about how distinctly unpopular our current national anthem is, and was, and probably shall always be. Can we find a way, somehow, some way, to change our national anthem? Just a thought. But it would be nice to have a song in which people remember all the words, and can actually sing the melody together. I've always felt "What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye would make a great national anthem. It's got great words, a great melody, and it's just funky enough to win crossover popularity. But I'm not holding my breath. 

Anyway, the point is this -- these two songs have come to symbolize a kind of divide in American culture. "God Bless America" is a great song -- it's got nice phrasing, and it's designed to inspire goosebumps in all the right places. It's kind of a march, and often you hear it with drums and horns and a kind of military feel to it. It's got the whole God thing in it, which carries a whole bunch of baggage in itself, depending on the listener. It's fun to sing, actually, and its sentiment is unhidden. 

"This Land Is Your Land," on the other hand, is a simple melody, borrowed from at least two other folk songs, and tells the tale of a country in which people are moving -- they're walking, they're on the ribbon of highway, they're looking around at the golden valleys, they're roaming and rambling. It is a song of rolling up the sleeves and taking stock of what's around, using the bounty before us for our own benefit. Oh, you bet there are political implications. Because Woody didn't write songs encouraging corporate CEOs to make use of the bounty before us. His song was for the folks on the lower ladder's rungs, the ones forced out of jobs and homes and anything like a decent life, because the banks and the bosses just couldn't use them anymore. It was 1940, pre-war, and a great deal of America was in bad trouble. Depression, droughts and gloom spread over the land like a blanket. One song offered hope in the night with a light from above, one song offered hope with feet walking on the ground. 

Both songs are treasures from two of the greatest American songwriters. And right now, in this moment in American history, they should both be shaken out and sung loudly by the great voices in this vast and amazing nation. Our voices. Yours and mine. We haven't been doing a lot of collective singing in this country over the past thirty years or so; we've let the pop stars do it for us. It's time we, as a nation, took the microphone away from the pop stars and chimed in ourselves, regardless of melodic ability. Singing isn't about being a good singer, it's about being sincere. To do that well, you need sincere material.

And these two songs are a great place to start.