America the Beautiful

Announcer: Now, along with the United States Marine Corps Color Guard to sing the National Anthem, famed recording artist Marvin Gaye. (Applause and cheering)

Sarah McConnell: When it comes to our national anthem, some of the most popular performances have been by African American singers and musicians. From Marvin Gaye’s version of the National Anthem at the NBA All-Star game...

Marvin Gaye (singing): ...and the rocket's red glare... the bombs bursting in air...

Sarah McConnell: ...to the even more groundbreaking version by Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. (Electric guitar music plays)

Sarah McConnell: Benjamin, what can you share about the history of African American renditions of patriotic songs? I’m Sarah McConnell, and this is With Good Reason.

Later in the show, author Ann Petry is little known today, but in the 1940s, she became the first Black woman writer to sell a million books.

Keith Clark: There are all of these voices that have been not just marginalized, but really rendered invisible, and hers is one of them. And I would put her work on par with any of the great novels written by white Americans or Black Americans.

Sarah McConnell: But first, there’s a long tradition of African American singers performing some of the more famous renditions of our nation’s most patriotic songs. Benjamin Ross is a former radio DJ in Washington, D.C., where he hosted a popular show featuring African American hymns, anthems, and spirituals on WYBC radio. We invited him on our show to share some of his favorites for the Fourth of July.

Marvin Gaye (singing): ...whose broad stripes and bright stars...

Benjamin Ross: You know, African Americans have been involved in singing patriotic songs as far back as the Revolutionary War, when many Blacks were brought into the army to play the drum or play the fife. Uh, but up into the Civil War, that’s when we see African American soldiers singing patriotic songs—particularly the 54th Regiment that came out of Massachusetts. They would sing a song called "The Colored Troops" or "Give Us the Flag."

It allowed them to transcend their slave background and become Americans because they were a part of the war, they were a part of the mission for which they were fighting for, and they now realized and became Americans as a part of what America stood for and the principles of the country.

But one of the major events that occurred that really brought African Americans singing patriotic songs up to the forefront was Marian Anderson.

Sarah McConnell: She was the phenomenal opera singer.

Benjamin Ross: Yes, she toured America and she toured Europe as well. In 1939, when she returned from a European tour, her supporters in Washington, D.C. wanted her to perform, and they chose Constitution Hall for her to sing in. At that time, Constitution Hall was the largest auditorium in Washington and was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Unfortunately, there was a clause in the contract that said no person of color could sing in Constitution Hall at that time, and so Marian Anderson was denied the opportunity to sing there. This outraged a number of people, including Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt was also a member of the DAR, and she abruptly resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution and saw to it that Marian Anderson did sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939.

The very first song that she sang was "My Country, 'Tis of Thee, Sweet Land of Liberty, of thee we sing." She changed the wording—instead of saying "of thee I sing," she said "of thee we sing." Later on, uh, when she was asked about that, she commented that we all live in the same community here in the United States of America. We are not islands unto ourselves, and she certainly held no bitterness toward the country or to the people who had, uh, shown her such injustice. Let's hear that right now.

Marian Anderson (singing): My country, 'tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee we sing. Land where my fathers died, Land of the pilgrims' pride, From every mountain side, Let freedom ring.

Sarah McConnell: You’ve also brought with you a piece by one of my favorite singers of all time, Paul Robeson. When I was small, I listened to him over and over and over, and of course, at that time, I didn't realize the adversity he faced in his career.

Benjamin Ross: Paul Robeson, yes, was a very, very exciting and controversial gentleman. Uh, born in 1898 in Princeton, he got a scholarship to go to Rutgers University. Uh, he went on to enjoy a career as a lawyer, an actor, a singer, but most importantly, as an international activist.

Sarah McConnell: When was this?

Benjamin Ross: This was around the, uh, 1930s, 1940s. He took on some very controversial views regarding communism. Matter of fact, they blacklisted him, and the United States Department of State, uh, revoked his passport so that he could not travel abroad as he had been doing before.

But he continued to, uh, speak out against racism, not only in this country but, uh, injustices, uh, similar injustices around the world. And he continued to sing, and many songs that he sang were songs that were saluting America. He felt that, uh, if we were the country that we say that we are and how we look upon racism, then we should be the same not only in this country, but also in many countries around the world.

Sarah McConnell: And what Paul Robeson song are you playing for us now to sort of illustrate his patriotic music?

Benjamin Ross: Paul Robeson is going to sing "The House I Live In."

Paul Robeson (singing): What is America to me? A name, a map, or the flag I see? A certain word, democracy? What is America to me? The house I live in, a plot of milk or street, The grocer and the butcher and the people that I meet. The children in the playground, the faces that I see, All races, all religions, that's America to me. The place I work in, the workers at my side, The little town or city where my people live and die. The holy and the handsheet, the air of feeling free, The right to speak my mind out, that's America to me. The words of old Lincoln, of Jefferson and Paine, Of Washington and Douglas, and the task that still remains. The little bridge at Concord where freedom's fight began, Our Gettysburg and Midway, and the story of the turn. The town I live in, the street, the house...

Sarah McConnell: I love his voice and his delivery so much. I was surprised that you listed his singing as perhaps below his activism, his acting, and some other activities.

Benjamin Ross: He was a great baritone and bass. Uh, he was a wonderful actor. He played in many, many starring roles—Othello in particular, he starred in that.

But he's a great example of African Americans who endured racism. Uh, you know, once when he was serving as a lawyer, a white secretary refused to take dictation from him, and so he didn't, uh, keep on in that, uh, legal career.

Sarah McConnell: Ray Charles is another singer that you brought with you. His rendition of "America the Beautiful" is so popular it's even been repurposed for television commercials for a lot of different products. But this is one of the most stirring songs for me, and I’m sure for countless others.

Benjamin Ross: It is rather ironic that his recording of "America," which he did in the early 1970s, has turned out to be such a popular and endearing rendition of "America." He mixed it up with his brand of rhythm and blues, old church gospel music, and even with The Raelettes singing behind him. And his version of it is so stirring, many people are moved to tears.

Ray Charles (singing): Oh beautiful, for heroes proved... In liberating strife... Who more than self, their country loved... And mercy more than life... America... mm, America... May God thy gold refine... Till all success be nobleness... And every gain divine. (Music continues) You know when I was in school, we used to sing it something like this, listen here... Oh beautiful, for spacious skies...

Benjamin Ross: And you know, that, um, version of "America," he sang it at the Republican National Convention for Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

Sarah McConnell: Oh, wonderful, wonderful. So many African American singers have performed patriotic music at inaugurations.

Benjamin Ross: Yes, um, Aretha Franklin has sung, Beyoncé has sung, Denise Graves, even Ethel Ennis, the rhythm and blues singer—she sang for President Nixon for—at his inauguration.

Sarah McConnell: And we have time for just one more performer. There've been so many renditions of our national anthem, but you’ve said your favorite is Whitney Houston.

Benjamin Ross: Yes, um, her version of "The Star-Spangled Banner," it went onto the top of the Billboard charts. It was so exciting, and of course, she had such a phenomenal voice.

Sarah McConnell: This was 1991. Let's listen.

Benjamin Ross: Yes.

Whitney Houston (singing): Oh, say can you see... by the dawn's early light... What so proudly we hailed... at the twilight's last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars... through the perilous fight... O'er the ramparts we watched... were so gallantly streaming? And the rockets' red glare... the bombs bursting in air... Gave proof through the night... that our flag was still there... Oh, say does that star-spangled... banner yet wave... O'er the land of the free... and the home of the brave? (Massive applause and cheers)

Sarah McConnell Benjamin Ross, this has been wonderful. Thank you for sharing your insights with me, and your music, on With Good Reason.

Benjamin Ross:: And thank you so much, Sarah, for having me on your wonderful program.

Sarah McConnell: Benjamin Ross is a historian of the Sixth Mount Zion Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, and a former radio DJ in Washington, D.C. You’re listening to With Good Reason.

A Reading of "America" and Commentary (Show segment 2)

Walt Whitman: America

Center of equal daughters, equal sons,

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,

A grand, sane, towering, seated, cosmic,

Collie, of teach, for the tasks of the world, all tasks to be done meetly by thee,

Greater than all the past, than all the stories of the given past,

A long, long series of ships, of women and men,

All, all shall come into thee, and be of thee, and for thee.

Of the work of the present, of the work of the future,

Mother of all, all shall come from thee.

This very early wire recording is thought to be of Walt Whitman himself reading his poem, America. You can just make out the words "strong, ample, fair, enduring".

Ezra Pound called Walt Whitman "America's poet". And during the Civil War, Whitman actually devoted himself to healing thousands of wounded soldiers. He held them, dressed their wounds, wrote their letters home, and even spoon-fed them ice cream.

Mara Scanlon and Brady Earnhart are fans of Whitman and professors of English at Mary Washington University in Fredericksburg, where Whitman first saw the violence of the Civil War. He spent the rest of the war nursing thousands of wounded soldiers back to health.

Sarah McConnell: Brady, let me start with you. What first gave him prominence as a writer? Was it Leaves of Grass?

Brady Earnhart: There are a couple of ways of answering that. One is that the book he wrote that sold more copies than anything else during his lifetime was his temperance novel, Franklin Evans, that he put out in 1842. But after that, there's this sort of historical black hole in the late '40s, and then all of a sudden, in 1855, he comes out with this groundbreaking book called Leaves of Grass. And it's so remarkable that Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is the highest-paid lecturer in the country, who's one of these famous, famous figures, writes him a letter:

"I greet you at the beginning of a great career."

It's the most famous letter in American literary history.

And what does Whitman do? But he takes this letter and leaks it to friends of his in the press so that it gets published without Emerson's permission. Whitman goes further and publishes "I greet you at the beginning of a great career" on the spine of the second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856.

Sarah McConnell: He's a shameless self-promoter.

Brady Earnhart: Yeah, that's one of those terrible contradictions, or wonderful contradictions, as the case may be, about Whitman.

Sarah McConnell: So, on one hand, we have Emerson saying, "I greet you at the beginning of a fabulous career." And then you have prominent critics calling the work disgusting.

Well, I think there's two things about it. One is that the form burst through what would be considered well-made poetry of the time in those long, lengthy, prosy lines of Whitman's. That would not have been seen as good poetry, in a way. And then also, the things he wrote about were inappropriate for what Brady was calling that kind of schlocky, sentimental poetry of the time. To make a list of Americans that includes not only the president and his cabinet, but also opium-eaters and prostitutes; to write about sexuality, about slavery, about his own body. It's all material that would not have been seen as decorous, appropriate material for poetry.

Brady Earnhart: Emily Dickinson's friend and sometime editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, asked her if she'd read Walt Whitman's work. And she said, "Why, of course I haven't read it, but I've heard it's disgraceful."

Anyway, one of the things that people found disgraceful was the way that Whitman talked about the female body, which—he was trying to de-sensationalize and sort of de-smut-ify sex.

Mara Scanlon: I think that's true of his discussion of the body all together. And the individual human body comes to also stand for him for the national body, which he was very, very interested in speaking for and representing. And this passage I'm about to read talks about his desire to represent these people who otherwise are not represented in poetry. You hear how explicit he insists on what he's going to include:

Through me many long dumb voices,

Voices of the interminable generations of prisoners and slaves,

Voices of the diseased and despairing and of thieves and dwarfs,

Voices of cycles of preparation and accretion,

And of the threads that connect the stars, and of wombs and of the father-stuff,

And of the rights of them the others are down upon,

Of the deform'd, trivial, flat, foolish, despised,

Fog in the air, beetles rolling balls of dung.

Through me forbidden voices,

Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil,

Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd.

I do not press my fingers across my mouth,

I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and heart,

Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,

Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from,

The scent of these arm-pits hairier than prayer,

This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

You hear how revolutionary that claim is even today, and the sweeping rhetoric of that poetry—that the poetry might accomplish something that traditional politics, which he was getting less enamored of at that time, just weren't going to heal the nation the way the right poet might just do.

Sarah McConnell: The Civil War really changes him. What was his role during the Civil War?

Brady Earnhart: Well, he was deeply concerned about the fracturing of the country that was happening in the years that led up to the Civil War. As it became clear that the South and the North were not going to reconcile without a fight, he became a staunch unionist. And he actually, like a lot of people in the North, welcomed the war and became even a sort of shockingly bloodthirsty war booster because he saw that—he thought of this as a process that was going to cleanse the country.

Mara Scanlon: Whitman was initially drawn into the fighting areas of the Civil War by the wounding of his brother, George—George Washington Whitman. But he was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg, where thousands and thousands of men died in a day because they were directed to march up from the river through what were then open plains. The Confederates were entrenched behind a wall and in very protected positions, and just mowed them down. And Walt traveled to Fredericksburg to find his brother. He was very shocked to see the wounded there.

So, he finds his brother there, spends a few days among the soldiers, heads to D.C. and essentially, I think the best way to say it is, he felt a calling to remain among the Civil War soldiers as a—he called himself a spiritual missionary, a soldiers' missionary, a wound—he called himself a wound dresser, to actually Confederate and Union soldiers in those hospitals for the next several years, for the duration of the war and beyond.

Brady Earnhart: After the war, he wrote:

"In my visits to the hospitals, I found it was in the simple matter of personal presence and emanating ordinary cheer and magnetism that I succeeded and helped more than by medical nursing or anything else."

He would write letters to their moms for them. He would bring them tobacco or whiskey or...

Mara Scanlon: Ice cream.

Brady Earnhart: He would pet them. He would give them ice cream.

Mara Scanlon: And he embraced them quite a bit. I mean, he records over and over, you know, "I sat with this man and I held his hand, I hugged him, I kissed him, I embraced him. They reach for me, they want me to kiss them and embrace them." Those soldiers came to represent for him a camaraderie that he saw as the best possible form of national unity and democracy.

But then other times, it becomes so personal. This section, for instance, is called "A Case from Second Bull Run":

Poor John Mahay is dead. He died yesterday. His was a painful and long-lingering case. The bladder had been perforated by a bullet going entirely through him. Not long since, I sat a good part of the morning by his bedside, Ward E, Armory Square. The water ran out of his eyes from the intense pain, and the muscles of his face were distorted, but he uttered nothing, except a low groan now and then. Poor Mahay, a mere boy in age, but old in misfortune.

Sarah McConnell: You know, Whitman was what we would term now homosexual. How did his sexuality play into his experience nursing soldiers?

Brady Earnhart: Oh, that's a really sad—the sad story, because it was an occupational hazard when he was working in the hospitals to to fall in love with soldiers. And he did so all the time. Fall in love is maybe an exaggeration. There were a couple of soldiers in particular, though, that he was very drawn to and who seemed to have been sort of uncertain as to how to respond. In particular, one named Tom Sawyer. Whitman seems to have pursued pretty diligently, and Walt would write him letters that said things like, "Tom, you know, didn't you get my last letter that had the self-addressed envelope on it so you could write back to me?" It's just so painful.

Mara Scanlon: I agree with that, and yet I also think that it is really pathetic at times. And then at other times, I think it's beautiful because Brady was talking before about how he was living out what he had written about before. And here we find somebody who's relating to these suffering human beings with all of himself: his desire, his affection, his literary ability, his intellect, all of those things that he can bring to them. And he does—all of it. I really—I'm very moved by the physical and erotic nature of his relationship to those soldiers, which doesn't seem predatory to me, but...

Brady Earnhart: Right. On the other hand, I think part of what makes it beautiful is the fact that it—it felt incomplete on some level, right? Incompleteness is the—is the soul of romance. And in some of his letters, Whitman says to these sold—to some of I think Tom Sawyer is one of them, he says, "I will never be truly happy unless you and I are living under the same roof and, you know, maybe we can find a farm somewhere." That kind of thing, which of course never happened.

Sarah McConnell: It's such a shame, isn't it, that most of us who aren't scholars have our first introduction to Whitman in maybe the card game Authors? And here you see this imposing bearded figure and you think, "I don't know who the heck Walt Whitman is, but it can't be great."

Mara Scanlon: Yeah, right. He seems like a little bit of a, you know, a nut job. We should redo that deck of card games.

Brady Earnhart: Yeah. Well, I think that's true of so much about literature. I think that sometimes students and other readers forget that every reader can do the same thing to a piece of literature—can make it breathe.

There's something about Whitman's, though, that's—that's more so than I think other, other authors. Robert Louis Stevenson, I think it was, said that Whitman was able to make you feel as you read one of his poems like he was standing over your shoulder, looking, looking down with you at the text. His work is full of phrases like, "Listener up there," "Come closer to me," "Loaf with me on the grass." And this really famous passage—this is from a poem called So Long!:

From behind the screen where I hid I advance personally solely to you.

Camerado, this is no book,

Who touches this touches a man,

(Is it night? are we here together alone?)

It is I you hold and who holds you,

I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me forth.

This idea of "who touches this touches a man." You know, you do feel like, "Oh, this is a—this is a person that I have here."

Mara Scanlon: But it does—I mean, it gets to a lot of what we've been saying about Whitman in the midst of the Civil War. That is that he understood himself both to be a wound dresser to the nation as a whole, who could find in his poetry a new map for how to proceed, and also that on the most intimate level, he straightened the collars and wrote the letters and fed the ice cream to individuals, and understood that in some ways, something we all have to be willing to do if we're going to survive as a nation, I think. That is, you can't always change things on a national scale. But sometimes you can spoon some ice cream to the sick and tired person next to you.

Sarah McConnell: Brady Earnhart and Mara Scanlon are professors of English at the University of Mary Washington.

Coming up next: Edgar Allan Poe's sense of humor.

Edgar Allan Poe only lived to be 40, but in his short life, he wrote stories and poems with far-reaching influence. Jerome McGann is a professor of English emeritus at the University of Virginia. He says although Poe's stories seem gloomy and depressing, he was actually a great idealist, constantly searching for the beautiful and the sublime.

Sarah McConnell: So he was born Edgar Poe, but then adopted by the relatively wealthy Mr. Allan.

Jerome McGann: Well, his mother and father died when he was young, and he was then adopted by Mr. Allan.

Sarah McConnell: So he became Edgar Allan Poe. And Allan cared for him a great deal, right? He just eventually became disgusted with his wayward ways?

Jerome McGann: Well, it's a complicated situation. It all began when he was at the University of Virginia. Allan was fearful that Poe would become involved with drinking and with a fast life there, gambling and so forth. The University of Virginia at that time was, in fact, infamous for allowing its young men to misbehave in these ways. And indeed, when—when Poe was there, he got involved with gambling and drinking and so forth. That's where his drinking problem began. And the consequence was that Poe was continually in need of money. Allan gave it grudgingly and—and finally just stopped giving it, and they had a break.

Sarah McConnell: What do you make of the fact that he married a cousin, a 13-year-old?

Jerome McGann: Well, that's a good example of the kind of idealism that he had. One of the major influences on his life was Lord Byron, and Byron had a similar kind of attachment to his half-sister. These kinds of attachments exhibit a form of idealism that is a major characteristic of both Byron and Poe.

Sarah McConnell: It's so interesting because his actual upbringing was rather refined, and his education was refined. And yet, we think of him as having lived this debauched life on one level.

Jerome McGann: That is true. He was raised well and educated well, although his adoptive father cut him off. And that began a life of extreme poverty. There probably was no major writer in the 19th century who was so perpetually impoverished as Poe was.

Sarah McConnell: In the popular mind, Edgar Allan Poe's forever the intense, brooding man in that portrait that we all see. Was he the Stephen King of his time, or was his literary legacy much more than that?

Jerome McGann: Well, the most famous genre that he is said to be the creator of is the detective story. He is probably the first great short story writer in the world. So his influence on all later short story writing is—is immense. And of course, in the literature of the Gothic, horror literature, the literature of terror, and that sort of thing, he's very, very important. Probably no American writer, with perhaps the exception of James Fenimore Cooper, had a greater international reputation than Poe.

Sarah McConnell: And why was that? Who was championing him abroad?

Jerome McGann: First of all, Baudelaire. He was completely obsessed with Poe. And after Baudelaire, then came Mallarmé, who was equally obsessed with Poe. And then into the 20th century, Valéry. So in terms of, for example, French poetical history, you probably can't get a more influential triad of figures than Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry.

Sarah McConnell: What was it about Poe that held them in such thrall?

Jerome McGann: The—the drunkenness and alcoholism is closely related to Baudelaire and Mallarmé's understanding of Poe. The figure of the cursed poet, the poète maudit, was very, very influential and important for the cultural period of the late 19th and early 20th century. And Poe was seen as the paradigmatic cursed poet.

Sarah McConnell: And of course, then dying young as he did, just sort of added to the mystique for them.

Jerome McGann: Indeed. Almost an allusion to the famous ancient proverb: "Whom the gods love die young."

Sarah McConnell: And what did they love about his take on life?

Jerome McGann: Uh, they loved his pursuit of the impossible and the beautiful beyond this world of material forms. And the best way I can talk about this is to quote part of a famous passage from a very famous essay that he wrote called The Poetic Principle:

An immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful. We have still a thirst unquenchable to allay, which even the poet has not shown us the crystal springs. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above.

The sense that Poe always gives in his writing is that there is a barrier and a bar that is always standing in the way of this pursuit of the impossible.

Sarah McConnell: You've written something about Poe that fascinates me. You say he understood as few have that fear of the unknown is related to our human desire for beauty. Help me understand how.

Jerome McGann: The point is wonderfully laid out in a passage that I might read. This is how it goes:

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own — the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple — a few plain words — “My Heart Laid Bare.” But — this little book must be true to its title.

No man dare write it. No man ever will dare write it. No man could write it.

This led Baudelaire, in fact, to try to write such a book, Mon cœur mis à nu, which was a kind of journal in which he tried to lay bare this heart. But this heart is inaccessible.

Sarah McConnell: It's really wonderful, isn't it?

Jerome McGann: Yes, it is.

Sarah McConnell: Did—did he have a sort of depressed and morbid outlook, as so many of his stories and poems would suggest?

Jerome McGann: On the contrary. He was a famous conversationalist. He was high-spirited. He was a great comic writer. And his famous horror stories are always, or nearly always, underscored by a very deep sense of irony and humor.

Sarah: Jerome, thank you for talking with me. Jerome: Thank you.

Sarah: With Good Reason is produced by Virginia Humanities, which acknowledges the Monacan Nation, the original people of the land and waters of our home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Our production team is Allison Quantz, Matt Darroch, and Lauren Francis. Special thanks to Jennie Taylor for booking assistance and to Jordan Christie at WHRV for recording assistance. For the podcast, go to withgoodreasonradio.org. I’m Sarah McConnell, thanks for listening.