America The Beautiful, a history lesson

Seriously, people just need to get over themselves. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Coca-Cola produced a commercial for the Super Bowl this past weekend that had many people in this country going crazy. It seems that people take pop songs about America very seriously. I hate to see what would happen if a Canadian Rapper did a cover of Lee Greenwood’s Proud to Be an American.

 

Sadly, to show the overall lack of intellect by so called “Proud Americans”, many people complained that the National Anthem shouldn’t be sung in a language other than English. Yeah, it seems these really proud Americans don’t know that this is not the anthem of the country.

But what is the song, you ask, that its mere singing in another language has driven people out of their mind?  The song was based on an 1895 poem called Pikes Peak, written by Katharine Lee Bates.  The title was changed to America, since the magazine in which it first appeared was published on July 4^th. The music behind it, written by Samuel ward, was lifted from another one of Ward’s works, a song called O Mother Dear, Jerusalem. In 1910, the song itself was published, and America the Beautiful was born. Now, several times over the last hundred years, there has been a push to put America the Beautiful on the same pedestal as The Star Spangled Banner. To this date, this has yet to happen. The consensus is that the Star Spangled Banner relies too much on war images, and doesn’t represent America. The song itself has been written and re-written three times since Bates first put pen to paper. So, before everyone loses their collective heads anymore, the song you’re getting so mad about is a third edition re-write.

Because the song got is beginnings as a hymn, which is perhaps why the song has never gotten to the stage of the Star Spangled Banner.  I still can’t figure out why every thinks that a hymn needs to be sung only in English. After all, aren’t we the giant melting pot? Isn’t the sharing of the song a great way to bound with people of other nations?

And therein lays the main issue, which people don’t really have a damn clue about the true meaning of the song. It has at its core, nothing really to do with the flag, mom, and apple pie. The song was written as an ode to the mountain, lakes, rivers, and beauty of the land of America, not the people, not the flag. The song says here is this great land, with these beautiful sites to see, these lakes, these mountains. And there is nothing wrong with someone singing about this country to their native people in their native tongue. They are singing about the purity of America. Why must the onus be placed that you can only sing of America in English?

One thing that I’ve been staying away from is the people who’ve posted on the various social media outlets that song must be sung in English because it is the language of the natives of this land. That couldn’t be further from correct. If you really want to sing America the Beautiful in the first dialect spoken on America’s shores, then you better brush up on your Apache, Seminole, or Navajo. Just a small sample of the many natives that were here long before a group of people boarded a ship called the Mayflower.

I know I’ve pissed off more than a few people today by several times referring to America the Beautiful as a pop song of its day. I can deal with that, because it’s time that the myth is shed, and the truth be known. Despite the folklore attached to it, America the Beautiful was an ode to the land and sites of the nation’s heartland written by a lesbian. It is a song, not the anthem of America. I firmly stand by Coca-Cola for the Super Bowl commercial. Because I know that all of those nations represented in that commercial represent where many of our ancestors came from. Think about that.