Slate's Bizbox
dialogues: E-mail debates of newsworthy topics.

Our National Anthems

dialogues
entries
123456789
from: Josh Daniel
to: Alfred Gingold, Timothy Noah, Erik Tarloff

Posted Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

Alfred, Erik, Tim:

I like Alfred's Casablanca test. In fact, I think my dog in this fight—"This Land Is Your Land"—aces it. Imagine Americans pelting Nazis with these verses:

The sun came shining
As I was strolling
The wheat fields waving
And the dust clouds rolling
As the fog was lifting
A voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me

Or, even better:

Nobody living can ever stop me
As I go walking
That freedom highway
Nobody living can make me turn back
This land was made for you and me

Pretty damned stirring, if you ask me.

To my ear, "TLIYL" sounds, well, American. Its lyric contains none of the ancient-sounding Britishisms—thee, thou, O—of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" or "America the Beautiful." Nothing is "spangled" (whatever that means). California, the New York island, redwood forests, and Gulf Stream waters are unmistakably American. Who else but an itinerant worker like Woody Guthrie—who had hobo'd his way across the country, hitching rides on freight trains—could write a verse like this:

As I was walking
That ribbon of highway
I saw above me
That endless skyway
I saw below me
That golden valley.
This land was made for you and me.

Call me crazy, but I think a national anthem ought to evoke its country. If we turned "God Bless America" into "God Bless Canada," could you tell the difference? They've got mountains, prairies, and oceans white with foam too.

Granted, the lyrics are "TLIYL" 's strong point. Before Alfred mentioned his Casablanca test, I was thinking about an Olympics test: When an American skater wins the gold in Salt Lake City and stands up on the podium to accept her medal and hear the anthem, would a simple melody like "This Land" 's cut it? Well, no—see Erik's entry for a fine description of why "The Star-Spangled Banner" 's tune and chord progression, considered purely as music, whip up on Guthrie's familiar three-chord setup.

But also consider the beauty of having a national anthem people could actually sing. You wouldn't have to hear the music unadorned, because people would really want to join in. Even the most tonally challenged among us can manage the half-dozen notes of Guthrie's tune. And though the song's usually performed at a bouncy tempo that might seem inappropriate for a national anthem, it can be slowed down to great effect: Witness Bruce Springsteen's powerful rendition on his 1986 live album (to hear a clip, click here and scroll down to Live 1975-1985). On that track, Springsteen introduces "This Land" as "one of the most beautiful songs ever written." He'll get no argument from me.

P.S.: Yes, I know Guthrie was a Communist. But he only a half-hearted Communist, and only for a short while at that. Besides, Francis Scott Key was worse: He was a terrible poet, and that didn't stop us!

dialogues
entries
123456789
from: Josh Daniel
to: Alfred Gingold, Timothy Noah, Erik Tarloff

Posted Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET
Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Alfred Gingold has written eight books, Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column, Erik Tarloff is a novelist and Slate Book Clubber, and Josh Daniel is Slate's managing editor. This week they weigh the merits of our patriotic greatest hits.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Reader Comments From The Fray:


[Notes from the Fray Editor: Joseph Britt also commented on Erik Tarloff's remarks on the Fray; in fact Mr Tarloff is a very experienced Fray-watcher--see also BML's post here. BML also introduced the tangential but deeply fascinating topic of songs about states, here, while Urquhart revealed that Tennessee has six official state songs.]


Has it occurred to anyone else that Americans tend to regard singing the way our colonial ancestors regarded combat--as something anyone can do without any training or discipline, based on their natural ability? I think of this every time I hear someone moaning about how hard "The Star-Spangled Banner" (or, for that matter, "O Holy Night") is to sing. It's certainly a challenge, but challenges can be mastered by most people with a little practice and the right technique.

It goes back to the lamentable low standard of musical education in the public schools, a product of the soft bigotry of low musical expectations. It may be that currently popular music that is designed only to be danced to, not sung along with, bears some responsibility also. Thankfully no one has suggested we ought to have a national anthem we can dance to, not even in The Fray.

--Joseph Britt

(To reply, click here.)


I have to cast my vote with Josh on this one. Despite its terminal hootenanny connotations, "This Land" as a national anthem would be a defining break with the pseudo-arch prosody of nationalistic anthems, and would be in fact the first democratic people's anthem in history. Is that worth something?

Forget Pete Seeger and the debacles of the American Communist Party's Stalinization for a minute and think about the real progeny of Guthrie's road-minstrel folk revival: the entire boom baby generation. We came of age in a landscape where geiger counters were replacing rosaries, and the language of Dick and Jane had replaced the Bible and McGuffy's reader as our entree to literacy. We made out to the lyrics of doo-wop and had our moral awakenings in the turgid prose of surgeon-general's warnings.

We don't need, nor can we parse, the locutions of the founding fathers. While I was growing up, I didn't know anyone who could have paraphrased "The Star Spangled Banner," or glossed it beyond "something about rockets and our flag, kind of tattered, some battle. Baltimore?"

"God Bless America" is the song of Lion's Clubs and Rotary lunches, tent revivals and mall openings. It is for my generation an evocation of black and white rotoscope images of Milton Berle and Pearl Bailey. There is something contrived and reminiscent of gastro-intestinal finales at fund raisers and school auditoriums. It is the song of an ersatz America, a formulaic tin-pan populism that never really reaches beyond the footlights into the junk drawers, closets, photo albums and reveries of a real America.

I know that "TLIYL" will never become our national anthem. But it is a song closer to the dead center of the bell curve of true American sentiment than any of the others mentioned here.

--Zeitguy

(To reply, click here.)

 (10/2)

Washington Post