From our founding to the present, some songs have defined various eras of the country’s 250 years of existence. They evoke a sense of patriotism and togetherness.
Pulitzer-prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham and Grammy Award-winning musician Tim McGraw teamed up to create a unique and uplifting historical account of our nation’s musical past. The introduction’s stated thesis promises “History isn’t just something we read; it’s something we hear.” Meacham and McGraw take readers on a well-researched, musically focused American history journey.
Quotes, commentaries, and song lyrics convey a clear and enjoyable picture of “the music of the nation,” which the authors note in the introduction “reminds us where we’ve been, who we are – and what we can become.”
‘Secret Springs’
A quote by 19th-century American composer Elias Nason, shared on the epigraph page in “Songs of America,” captures an important aspect of the book: patriotism. “A patriotic song is an enchanted key to memory’s deepest cells; it touches secret springs.”
Meacham and McGraw also say in the introduction, which they title “Overture,” that they hope readers of “Songs of America” to truly grasp “the paramount role of music.”
Each chapter, beginning with “The Sensations of Freedom” about the revolution and the county’s founding, shares quotes by noteworthy historical figures before probing the music’s importance. The applicable quote by George Washington is “nothing is more agreeable, and ornamental, than good music.”
Also in each chapter are the stories behind once-popular, as well as still familiar, songs. For example, irony plays a part in “The Liberty Song” from 1768. Written mostly by John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, he set the words to a British Royal Navy tune. McGraw’s commentary on the songs are sidebars; he writes about “The Liberty Song”: “The irony of the choice of the music of the British anthem isn’t lost on me. … Dickinson’s lyrics provide a moral call to action.”
Along the same vein, the much-beloved “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” was written in 1831 by seminary student Samuel Francis Smith to the tune of “God Save the King.” Regarding that song, originally titled simply, “America,” McGraw opined that it is “about putting not a monarch but the nation itself, and the ideas on which it’s founded and with which it endures, at the center of our imaginative lives.”
Each chapter is easy to digest thanks to interspersed imagery. An image of a musical staff separates quotes from text. Historic posters and photography are prevalent throughout. The book showcases how all types of music have their place in the continuing American story. In fact, the last chapter ends with this: “For the song of America is not finished; the last notes have not yet been played. In that spirit, in that cause, now and always, let us lift every voice, and sing.”
‘Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music that Made a Nation’
By Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw
Random House; June 11, 2019
Hardcover, 320 pages
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