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Just Another Essay



Song of America

Essay Posted October 16, 2007 by James E. Nelson

My first college history course was great fun. (I know I’ve told this story in a previous post, but it is germane to this essay. Those of you who remember it can skip down a paragraph or two.) Doc Habermas asked us to bring the textbook and two different highlighters to class. Taking notes was discouraged; we were simply supposed to listen. Doc would regale us with stories from the past, and every now and then he would stop and say, “This is important, highlight it.” And all of us would dutifully pull out our yellow highlighter and mark the sentence or two in question. The week before a test we’d review the material and he would have us highlight everything on the test with a different color highlighter. When all was said and done, yellow would give us the basic outline of history and the other color would give us critical events that shaped things to come.

Doc Habermas’s method took a lot of the pressure off of memorizing a boatload of dates and places that, without context, were as overwhelming as a roomful of refugees on Ellis Island. Oh, there were certainly dates and places, but they were all clearly marked in the book. His method also brought history to life because he talked about real people and the things that happened to them.

History, as we typically use the term, is as dry and empty as a skeleton. It is a structure which guides us through the past, and to that end, it is primarily a recital of political events—that is, a description of the polis (the political and economic structure in which the hoi poloi, the masses, lived their daily lives). Historical novels, vignettes, Doc Habermas, and Ken Burns all try to zero in on individuals plucked from the masses (hoi poloi) in order to bring the story to life, but those individualized stories are still tools to help understand the big story of the polis.

In that sense, history (that is, the big story, and not Doc’s little stories) is as closely connected to the past as that bone our neighbor’s dog is chewing on is connected to the ranch and cattle herd the cow originally came from, and to the cowboy who pulled the calf from its mother’s womb, branded the calf a few months later, fed it hay during the blizzard, and eventually loaded it onto a cattle truck, headed for market. The bones (and that dog bone in particular) have no real connection to those events. But for those who have a way of connecting the bone of history with the flesh of real life, the bone may have a story. If the rancher was Greg Penson, the cow probably had name. If the rancher was Mark Bruckner, not only did the cow have a name, the virtues of that particular cow—whether he ever snuck out under the fence, etc.—were probably discussed while eating him along with potatoes and fresh bread on a cold winter night. If Blackie (Mark's dog) was chewing on the bone, Mark might reminisce with the dog about how Blackie chased this cow on a late summer evening two years ago.

And that’s precisely the problem of history. Just as hearing stories about this particular cow over a dinner featuring this particular cow, is for most people, a little too much information, so an attempt to learn history by learning all the details of all the people in history is too much information—an impossible task. History is not learning a lot of information, it is, more accurately, the art of learning what information to leave out.

And this leaves us with a big problem. Most teachers aren’t Doc Habermas or Ken Burns, who both have a knack for finding just the right individual story that will bring the big story to life. As a result, it is not uncommon to experience history as an overwhelming mixture of disconnected facts which can be both boring and intimidating.

Enter Janet Reno. Admittedly she was not our nation’s most exciting Attorney General. She was evidently not Florida’s most exciting political candidate either, because she failed to get elected when she ran for the senate. She’s one of the last people I’d want to hear sing a song. I was therefore incredulous when I heard she had just come out with a music CD with old songs on it.

But then one day XM Radio dedicated a whole hour to the collection, entitled Song of America, and like a person who slows down to stare at a gruesome crash along the highway, I found I just could not turn off the radio.

It turns out I was completely wrong about Janet Reno and the CD. First, it’s a three CD collection of fifty songs. Second, she neither sang them nor chose them. Instead, growing out of her experience as a history professor, she was the driving force behind getting this project started, and over the next nine years, encouraging Ed Pettersen, David Macias, and Bob Olhsson to complete the project. Third, it’s not about the music as music, but rather music as a window into our nation’s soul. As she describes it, “The historical detail of the songs fascinated me and I suggested that Ed record a whole album of songs focusing on key periods n American history, in order to tell our story to young people who might find joy in learning history through music.”

By the end of the hour I was enthralled with the music and the stories Dr. Reno told in conjunction with them. I figured that the feeling would soon pass, but it didn’t. A week or so later I was still enthralled and so I ordered the collection.

If you’re simply looking for an enjoyable collection of music, these are probably not the CDs you are looking for. Stylistically it is limited by the expertise and interests of Ed Pettersen, et. al. It is also decidedly down-tempo and introspective; for a three and a half hour collection, that is a distinct weakness. Because of its wide range of styles (Native American, old timey, folk, bluegrass, country, Celtic, mountain, jazz, blues, Negro Spiritual, pop, funk, hip hop, and I probably left a couple out), it certainly has something that everyone will dislike. But that being said, when understood in the context of what it is, it is a truly marvelous collection that I highly recommend to everyone.

I would call it an emotive history of America.

It’s not a casual collection of music. As a history, it is something appreciated only by those who hunker down and work to listen at it. It’s not that it’s hard work to listen to the music, it’s rather that if the listener is distracted or multitasking while listening, the mood and sense won’t sink in, the story won’t be grasped. The liner notes say, “Music is a creative force that can inspire, console, provoke or invite celebration.” I suspect the casual listener will be neither inspired, consoled, nor provoked, and there will then be no reason to celebrate.

Listening to this collection requires some concentration and work. It is more akin to reading and understanding a David McCullough or Stephen Ambrose biography than a Dan Brown historical thriller.

But what about the music?

Most of the songs are recast so that they can be heard anew. This is especially helpful for the well known songs in the collection. Hearing Alan Jackson’s “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning” as sung by The Wrights on this album, I realized that it is a well crafted song that gets at the heart of the post-9/11 malaise. But when Alan Jackson whines away at it on the local country western station, with his nasal voice, the song is simply irritating to my ears. When Helen Reddy gets in your face with the original version of “I Am Woman,” you can almost hear the bras crackling in the bonfire behind her. Martha Wainwright’s kinder and gentler version, on the other hand, allows the listener to hear the song without all the baggage of the original 70s song.

But this decision to rework every song has a decided disadvantage. Pettersen (the producer) works out of Nashville, and one can hear the signature of Nashville studio musicians and arrangers on most of the tracks. It gives the whole collection a bland, milk toast personality. At times you think you’re listening to Contemporary Christian radio. And no doubt many of the same studio musicians and arrangers that contributed to this collection are the “genius” behind the Contemporary Christian music sound.

That is best illustrated with the Yiddish lullaby “Sleep My Child” performed forgettably by Judith Edelman and Neilson Hubbard. The three discs reflect the cultural diversity of America by including Native American, Celtic, Negro Spiritual, and Western European music. Tim O’Brien’s Celtic rendition of the Irish song, “Thousands Are Sailing to Amerikay,” is stunning in its simplicity. Similarly, “Sleep My Child” offered the perfect opportunity to include klezmer music. But instead the song sounds like it came straight from the Nashville recording assembly line.

Most of the fifty songs are quite arresting in their beauty. The men’s a capella group Take Six offers a truly memorable rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. Especially moving is the fact that they feel no need to turn the end of the song into a sort of smash bang production, but keep it as simple as the first part of the song. Freedy Johnson’s “Peg and Awl” is also painfully beautiful in its simplicity.

But there are exceptions. Some of the music is strange enough to be reduced to an oddity. Jake Shimabukuro’s solo ukelele version of “Stars and Stripes Forever” is a technical wonder, but might possibly be more appropriate on “The Gong Show” than here. Danielson’s version of “Happy Days Are Here Again,” is so strange that it is reduced to a curiosity. (In the liner notes, people are given credit for the “la la vocal,” “meow, meow vocal,” da da vocal,” “whistle solo,” boh boh vocal,” “doo-wop vocal,” and “Baldwin Orga-Sonic.” One can only imagine that it was created for the Saturday morning cartoons.)

A couple of the songs are conceptual pieces. There is a brass quintet version of “God Save the King.” The hymn tune associated with it has a complex history. This song (in pre-Revolutionary days) was a favorite patriotic song across the British Empire. But as relations between England and America deteriorated, several versions of the song that made fun of the King began to appear. Eventually the text “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” became associated with the tune and everyone forgot the earlier antagonism associated with the tune. John Wesley Harding tries to express this history in the piece with a very disconsonant bridge. Unfortunately, it is not well executed and it is reduced to being simply disagreeable.

I don’t want my criticisms to be misconstrued. Most of the songs are quite wonderful. But the collection is uneven enough that if you purchase it simply to enjoy the music, I suspect you’ll be disappointed. But this collection of fifty songs is about something very different than that. Allow me to return to the analogy of a cow in order to explain.

Although I grew up in town, I spent quite a bit of time around cattle. I doubt I will ever tire of looking a milk cow in the face. Their eyes are so warm, moist, and inviting. Their noses are velvety soft and prickly at the same time. Their breath always seems to have a hint of oats or clover on it. It’s hard not to have a sense of well being when face to face with a contented milk cow. (Angry one’s are a different matter, but that’s another story.)

I’ve also come up on a cow skeleton while riding horseback out on the prairie. There is nothing more lonely than a skeleton bleaching in the sun, with a bit of the hide pulled off to the side (probably by coyotes) and sage brush and yucca growing up around it, hiding the unseemliness of it all from view.

Studying history from the pages of the Houghton-Mifflin textbook is a lot like that skeleton. It’s barren, empty, and a little bit lonely when we see ourselves in the context of the broad sweep of history. But listening to this emotive history offered on “Song of America” is more akin to the watery eyes and velvet nose of the milk cow. It’s a way of dipping into history with all the consolation, provocation, and celebration that can occur when you are accompanied into the past with real people, real stories, and a soundtrack that draws us, the listener, into that reality.

At the beginning of this essay, I spoke of the nightmare of history when it is presented as a boatload of dates and places that, without context, are as overwhelming as a roomful of refugees on Ellis Island. I was actually thinking of Janet Reno’s grandfather when I wrote that sentence. His surname was Rasmussen when he lived in Denmark. But when he arrived at Ellis Island, he was merely an anonymous face among a boatload of faces. And quite frankly, the immigration officials wanted their job to be as easy as possible. The name Rassmussen wasn’t easy. It didn’t fit into the forms very well. So in the crushing anonymity of Ellis Island he was turned into a Reno, and a bit of his history was bleached away like so much bone in the lonely sun of time.

Our nation is full of Rasmussens qua Renos. It’s full of people who are history-less, who look backward from their spot in time and see only a boatload of anonymous faces. “Song of America” is a small step toward connecting us, at an emotive level, to the story and stories that give life to the dry bones of history. It is a welcome gift and I applaud those involved for their persistence over nearly a decade to finish the project.