American Tune
When I was in grade school we learned all the old patriotic songs. The Star Spangled Banner of course (which came in handy during the 1970s Oakland A’s winning streak). But we also learned America the Beautiful, the Irving Berlin tune God Bless America, Woody Guthrie’s great This Land Is Your Land, and a whole raft of other stuff.
It’s one of those weird things, the hymns of your youth still live in your heart somewhere, despite all the things you learn in the meantime. Or rather, the feelings those anthems evoke live on. Of course, as Deborah pointed out recently there were really two Americas all along, and we only learned about the melodious one in those early years. When I became an adolescent and started to get cynical, I found a whole new crew of friends who shared my basic condition: being a shattered idealist in search of a new ideal to latch onto. But that’s another story.
I still sing the national anthem at baseball games, and when my kids were young I made sure they could sing it, too. Most of the other songs have faded into comfortable obscurity in my memory, getting hauled out occasionally for trivia games and ironic renditions. Yet there is one patriotic song that chokes me up still, every time I hear it.
It captures perfectly all the complexity of an idealism that died but still lives; the bitter disappointment and deeper hope which are intertwined in the soul of this country. When this tune comes on the radio, all activity must cease as I sing along. Paul Simon wrote it after Nixon’s re-election in 1972, and performed it again last month on the Colbert Report. If you missed the show, here is his performance. See if you can watch it without getting a little misty-eyed.
December 7th, 2008 at 12:06 am
Love the original verses of THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND, which we didn’t learn all of them at school (at least not at my elementary school…Gutherie was pretty radical)
What’s the name of Simon’s song? (I’m stuck w/ dial-up where I live, so I lose out on a lotta stuff…..at least I could google the words – or remember which song you meant )
Thanks
December 7th, 2008 at 6:12 am
There are so many moments in ‘American Tune’ that I love, and it never ceases to move me. The whole album (‘There Goes Rhymin’ Simon’) is similarly full of those wonderful little moments, but I never really put the one song, or the album, into the context of Nixon’s re-election. The nostalgia of it makes so much more sense now. It also makes me wish that ‘American Tune’ had been a much more obvious presence on our national soundtrack these last eight years — hearing it now, in the waning days of the Bush administration, just makes me shudder with recognition and feel thankful again for the renewed sense of optimism all around. But what a great song. Thanks for getting it back into my ears.
December 21st, 2008 at 1:22 am
Ok, I can’t help myself :-)
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=tyPjVV7brDQ&feature=channel