Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Reepicheep's avatar

Great piece. If there's anything we Americans love, it's our civil religions in all their incarnations, and our secular hymns. Either Berlin's wistful and grateful agnosticism, grateful enough to give God a nod, or Woody's folksy fist-shaking at God and deification of the land and the people.

I sometimes feel that Woody's spirit won the day. Sure, Americans of many tribes pay God lip service, but our civil religionism feels more like blood-and-soil than Irving's gratitude. Or maybe I'm just paying too much attention to MAGA.

Woody died in '67 with "this machine kills fascists" still painted on his guitar. I think he, and all of his descendants, still have their foreheads set like flint against the counterexample of the Kalashnikov rifle, on its butt painted "this machine makes folk music." Few comfortable American communists ever had to travel abroad and see firsthand just how much commies "loved the people", or hear those folk laments in their natives tongues.

I have a particular fondness for the folky tunes about America, which don't call God out by name. This is probably just because of the sample set... there certainly haven't been many of the latter written in the past 100 years for me to grow fond of...

There are several modern American tunes vying for the title of "great". I think of Neil Diamond's immigrant anthem "America", Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans" made famous by Willie. I wonder which ones, God willing, we'll be wistfully remembering in 100 years?

Since America is an idea as much as it is a country, we might find the one anthem that outlives is all is John Denver's "Country Roads", on the merit of its huge popularity abroad, among all sorts of non-English speakers. Not necessarily a song extolling America as a nation, but nevertheless one which makes a lot of people want to be Americans. A song about coming home.

Expand full comment
1 more comment...

No posts