articles
This Song is Your Song, This Song is My Song
From a Letter to the Editor submitted to the Star Tribune by Craig Hergert
Retired Star Tribune writer Trudi Hahn Pickett makes a strong case for letting the citizens themselves do the singing of the national anthem (“Let Us Sing,” June 28). Responding to Michael Kinsley’s column “O Say Can You Sing (the national anthem)?” (June 15), she writes, “We don’t need a new anthem; we need a new attitude.”
Her second point—including singing the anthem ourselves instead of having solo performers do it for us--is true enough. But a singable anthem wouldn’t hurt.
After Kinsley slammed “The Star Spangled Banner” for its warlike lyrics and unsingable tune, he offered seven replacements without developing an argument for any of them. In other words, he came off like the stereotype liberal: whining and calling for change, but unwilling to do the heavy lifting the change would require.
So allow this liberal to make the case for one of Kinsley’s possible substitutes: “This Land is Your Land.”
Kinsley isn’t the only one to complain about how hard the song is to sing. As choir director at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, Elizabeth Pauly has led her students through the song at numerous events. From her experience, she’s noticed that “even the pros struggle with it.” From my experience, the rest of us have a heck of a time.
If our goal is to have everyone sing our national anthem, wanting one that’s singable isn’t nit-picking but downright essential. And that’s why Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” is the ideal choice.
Guthrie’s former singing partner Pete Seeger once said that one way to destroy a song is to make it official. When it comes to this one, though, I’m willing to take that chance because the awards would outweigh the risks.
Local folksinger Larry Long, a friend of Seeger’s, thinks “This Land” is already our unofficial national anthem. As he explains, “Because of its deep history in the American experiment, it’s been sung by the left and the right, and everyone seems to feel an ownership of it.”
That’s why it was the perfect choice for Seeger and Bruce Springsteen to sing along with the thousands at the Lincoln Memorial at Barack “No-Red-States-and-No-Blue-States” Obama’s pre-inaugural concert last January.
When Springsteen asked Seeger which verses of the song they should do for that event, Seeger replied, “All of them.” And so a national audience discovered that this song they loved has six verses, not three, including one in which the songwriter stands with his people by a relief office. Here’s the key line: “As they stood there hungry, I stood there whistling/‘This land was made for you and me.’”
As Hahn points out, we tend not to sing all the verses of our national anthem. Still, if we make “This Land” our official anthem, I’m guessing more people will discover the whole kit and caboodle. And there’s something right about Americans having an anthem that illustrates the possibility of both loving and criticizing and your country.
But back to sing-ability. Long believes that if the national anthem of a democratic country is unsingable, the song goes against the country’s purpose of inclusion. “That high note in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is so out of reach, people can’t touch it,” he explains. And if you can’t hit the note, you can’t own the song.” Add to the accessible tune the fact that the lyrics are about how the land belongs to all of us and you have an anthem that succeeds in both form and function.
So by all means let’s all lobby, as Hahn does, to sing our national anthem ourselves. But can we please have one we can all sing?
Craig Hergert is a professor of English and popular culture at Minneapolis Community and Technical College.