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Published: Thursday, 14 November 2024 at 12:17 PM
Songs about America: 12 of the best musical evocations of the American soul and landscape
It’s no surprise to discover just how many songs have something to say about America. What is more striking is their range of emotional flavours – from the unambiguously patriotic, to the bitingly cynical, as well as those that fall somewhere in between. Here is our list of the ten best songs about America.
Best songs about America
Leonard Bernstein: ‘I like to be in America’
This song from Leonard Bernstein’s iconic musical West Side Story is as much a tribute to America as it is a sardonic take-down of its less appealing aspects. It features Puerto Rican immigrants singing the USA’s praises, albeit with lashings of irony (‘everything free in America / for a small fee in America’). Bernstein’s take on the Hispanic idiom is as catchy as Sondheim’s witty lyrics.
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Woody Guthrie: ‘This Land is your Land’
Originally titled ‘God Blessed America for Me’, as a sarcastic response to Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’, this iconic 1940 folk song started life as a critique of the US.
That changed, however, after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, and the US’s consequent intervention, which helped to restore Woody Guthrie’s faith in his country. He renamed the song, dropping verses that were critical of the United States. All these years later, it is still widely acknowledged as the US’s alternative national anthem.
Lee Greenwood: ‘God Bless the USA’
This 1984 hit for country singer Lee Greenwood has become one of America’s best known and best loved patriotic songs. Specifically, it has become something of an unofficial national anthem during times of national crisis, including after the September 11 attacks and during various military conflicts. Employing a beguiling mix of heartfelt lyrics and sincere delivery, Greenwood expresses pride in being an American and gratitude for the freedom and opportunities this nation offers.
The chorus, with its memorable line, ‘And I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free’, has achieved particular resonance widely, making it a staple at events like Fourth of July celebrations, military ceremonies, and other patriotic gatherings. One of the most enduringly resonant songs about America in the repertoire.
Bill Monroe: ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’
This melancholic waltz – one of the earliest examples of Bluegrass music – has become a classic since it was penned by Bill Monroe in 1945. The official state song of Kentucky, it was the first single that Elvis Presley ever recorded, and has also been covered by the likes of the Stanley Brothers, Patsy Cline and Sir Paul McCartney.
Harry McClintock: ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’
Harry McClintock based this catchy song on memories of hoboing through the United States as a youth while working for the railroad as a brakeman. As a result, it depicts a hobo’s idea of paradise: a place where ‘hens lay soft-boiled eggs’, where ‘the handouts grow on bushes’ and there are ‘cigarette trees’.
McClintock claimed to have written the song in 1895, but some believe it to have existed for far longer. Either way, it was only in 1949, when a sanitized version intended for children was re-recorded by Burl Ives, that it achieved widespread popularity.
Simon and Garfunkel: ‘America’
Telling of a couple’s hitchhiking adventures across the US, and the sense of liberation it brings them, ‘America’ ranks amongst Simon and Garfunkel’s most memorable songs. It’s a lilting number, with traces of the American Songbook, that, as described in a 2010 biography by Marc Eliot, speaks “of the singer’s search for a literal and physical America that seems to have disappeared, along with the country’s beauty and ideals.”
Charles Ives: Variations on America
Americans have a history of purloining the British National Anthem for their own patriotic purposes, generally singing it to the words ‘My Country, ‘Tis of Thee’ by Samuel Francis Smith (1808-95). Still, this example, written for organ by the composer Charles Ives for the 1892 Independence Day celebrations, is rather unusual. Full of bitonal dissonance and rhythmic quirks, it sounds as though it were intended as a satire when in fact Ives meant it as a sincere exercise in variations for organ.
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Don McLean: ‘American Pie’
Don McLean’s 1971 rock-folk anthem reflects movingly on American culture and on the shifting spirit of the 1960s. Part of the enduring appeal of ‘American Pie’ comes from its famously cryptic and layered lyrics, featuring references to iconic figures and events in music history, such as Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan. That unforgettable line, ‘The day the music died’ refers poignantly to the tragic 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson (The Big Bopper), marking an inevitable turning point in the story of rock and roll.
There’s a nostalgic feel to ‘American Pie’: an evocation of the loss of innocence and the turbulent social changes that America experienced during the 1960s and early 1970s. McLean’s poetic storytelling and that oh-so-catchy chorus made this a truly iconic song, a document of a moment of massive social upheaval in America. A sweeping journey through music, memory, and change, ‘American Pie’ has never stopped being one of the best songs about America.
Samuel Ward: America the Beautiful
In 1893, Katharine Lee Bates, a 33-year-old English professor at Wellesley College, took a train trip to Colorado Springs to teach at Colorado College. Several of the sights on her trip inspired her, not least the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the wheat fields of North America’s heartland Kansas and the majestic view of the Great Plains from high atop Pikes Peak. On the pinnacle of that mountain, she started dreaming up the words of a poem, and she wrote them down upon returning to her hotel room.
Eight years later, those words were combined with an existing tune by the recently-deceased New Jersey-based church organist and choirmaster Samuel A. Ward. Bates and Ward, sadly, never met. Yet the fruit of their combined labour continues to rank amongst the most rousing and dignified of musical tributes to America.
Vernon Duke: ‘Autumn in New York’
The backstory to this song began in 1921 when Vladimir Dukelsky, a young Belarusian immigrant musician, arrived in New York. There he met and befriended Jacob Gershwine, a second-generation Russian immigrant, who had, by then, already established his reputation as a composer, under his new name: George Gershwin.
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At his suggestion, Dukelsky changed his pen name to Vernon Duke, and started writing popular songs, one of which was this one: a soft and subtle expression of homesickness for New York, and the beauty of the city in autumn. Duke later said that it contained no popular appeal whatsoever in his publisher’s opinion, and he went on to write classical music and Russian poetry under his birth name until 1955.
Still, ‘Autumn in New York’ became embedded as a jazz standard, performed by everyone from opera singer Dawn Upshaw to Billie Holliday to jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker.
Aaron Copland (arr): ‘Simple Gifts’
The Shakers, a Christian sect that was born out of the Quakers, saw dance and movement as fundamental to religious worship. And this song, written in 1848 by the Maine-based Shaker Elder Joseph Brackett, epitomises that philosophy, triggering a toe-tapping urge in many a listener.
For all its vigour, however, ‘Simple Gifts’ remained little known outside Shaker communities until it caught the notice of 20th century American composer Aaron Copland. He wove its melody into the score of Appalachian Spring, his 1944 ballet that profiles a small settlement in 19th-century Pennsylvania, thus imbuing the song with a distinctly American flavour.
Igor Stravinsky (arr): ‘Star-Spangled Banner’
Igor Stravinsky had been living in the US for two years when he decided to make a patriotic gesture with this arrangement of the American national anthem, the iconic Star-Spangled Banner. But the gift was less than gratefully received. Following its performance at Boston’s Symphony Hall at the height of World War II in 1944, city police accused composer of defacing the anthem.
The Boston Police, misinterpreting a Federal law prohibiting “tampering” with the National Anthem, told Stravinsky that he had to remove his arrangement from the remaining programs. Reluctantly, he conceded, but he would go on to play his rearrangement for years after World War II ended, right up until his death in 1971.