While out walking at La Farm with my husband this morning, I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful everything was. Then I noticed the spacious skies and my mind went immediately to the words of “America the Beautiful.”
Given it’s the Fourth of July weekend, I’m sharing the words to this very precious song written in 1893 by 33-year-old Katherine Lee Bates. It wasn’t until many years later, in the 1920s, that an essay containing this poem by Bates was first printed.
Samuel A. Ward, a church organist, composed the music for the song after a day at Coney Island, but Ward died in 1903, a year before his music was joined with Bates’ lyrics. Ward and Bates never met.
No one made a great deal of money off the song. Bates received $5 for the initial publication of her poem and gave up all royalties to it when it was published. Ward’s family never moved to received payment for his music.
Amber waves of grain aren’t always enough. The song was considered a main contender for the national anthem, along with “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” and “The Star Spangle Banner.”
In 1931, President Herbert Hoover signed a law making the national anthem the “Star Spangled Banner,” upsetting many. In the decades since, many have continued to lobby for the anthem to be changed to the more peaceful, easier to sing “America The Beautiful.” A quick Google search reveals dozens of currently active petitions.
Following the words to the song is background from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. This is the version of the poem that Katharine Bates copyrighted and authorized people to use:
“AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL”
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine!
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
“In a brief essay that appeared ca. 1925, poet Katharine Lee Bates described her inspiration for writing “America the Beautiful,” the poem that would evolve into one of the nation’s best-loved patriotic songs, during a trip to Pike’s Peak in 1893. Bates was a professor at Wellesley and had traveled west to teach a summer course in Colorado Springs. Bates and the other professors decided to “celebrate the close of the session by a merry expedition to the top of Pike’s Peak.
“They made the ascent by prairie wagon. At the top, Bates later wrote, she was inspired by “the sea-like expanse of fertile country … under those ample skies,” and “the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind.” Those opening lines — “O beautiful for spacious skies, / For amber waves of grain, / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain!” — would eventually become the lyrics of one of the best-known songs in American history.
Bates finished writing “America the Beautiful” before leaving Colorado Springs but didn’t think of publishing it until two years later.
“The poem was first printed in a weekly newspaper, The Congregationalist, on July 4, 1895. Bates’s patriotic words were soon set to music, most popularly to composer S. A. Ward’s “Materna,” the tune to which we sing it today. Celebrating “country loved” and the “patriot dream,” the song resonated with Americans from all walks of life and became enormously popular.
“Within 20 years, Bates (after revising some of the lyrics in 1904) had “given hundreds, perhaps thousands, of free permissions” for “America the Beautiful” to appear “in church hymnals and Sunday School song books of nearly all the denominations; … in a large number of regularly published song books, poetry readers, civic readers, patriotic readers … in manuals of hymns and prayers and anthologies of patriotic prose and poetry … and in countless periodicals.
“While Bates was initially surprised by the poem’s success, she later reflected that its enduring “hold as it has upon our people, is clearly due to the fact that Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood.”
One of my favorite renditions is by Ray Charles. You can hear his glorious voice singing it on this link:
Whether you hear “America the Beautiful” at the next presidential Inauguration in January 2017 or the Super Bowl Feb. 4, 2018, in Minneapolis, it can also come up in unexpected places, like on a morning walk on a gravel road near La Farm by Ashby, Minn.
One thought on “LA VALLEUR COMMUNICATES: Musings By Barbara La Valleur — ♪♫♫♪♫♪ Oh, Beautiful ♪♫♫♪♪♫ ♫♫♪♫ For Spacious Skies ♫♫♪♫”
Arnie July 3, 2016 at 10:44 am
Stellar work, Barbara!
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