SONGS OF AMERICA

Historian Meacham (The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, 2018, etc.) teams up with country star McGraw to chart the course of American patriotic music from the Revolution to the present.

Significant events in American life have always had a soundtrack. Bruce Springsteen was ready with “My City of Ruins” when 9/11 occurred, having already recorded it, but it would be a while before Neil Young would release “Let’s Roll” and Alan Jackson would craft “Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning?)” As McGraw writes of the songs on Springsteen’s album The Rising in one of the scattered sidebars in which he offers commentary on Meacham’s text, “it’s understandable how these songs have come to be anthems for the brave men and women of the New York fire and police departments.” Neither the main text nor McGraw’s commentary goes particularly deep, and if there’s a thesis, it might be in Meacham’s closing: “The whole panoply of America can be traced—and, more important, heard and felt—in the songs that echo through our public squares.” The authors are agreeably inclusive in their repertoire, from “This Land Is Your Land” and “We Shall Overcome“ to "Over There" and “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” the last of which, McGraw holds, invokes pride, adding, “maybe it’s not cool to say that.” Some songs are well known, such as “Yankee Doodle,” while readers will be glad to know some of the less-remembered tunes of the Revolution, such as “The Liberty Song.” A nice touch comes when Meacham puts the Cuban missile crisis in the context of Bob Dylan’s discography: If the missiles had flown, he notes, it’s possible that “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” “would be the last song Dylan would ever write."

Not in the musicological class of Alan Lomax or at the historical heights of David Hackett Fischer’s Liberty and Freedom, but worthy reading for the anthemically minded.