Throughline - American Anthem

Episode Date: July 4, 2019

The Star-Spangled Banner is the official anthem for the United States, but there are plenty of songs that have become informal American anthems for millions of people. This week, we share three stories from NPR Music's American Anthem series that highlight the origins of songs that have become ingrained in American culture.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hey, I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Adab-Louie, and this is ThruLine from NPR. So, it's July 4th. Do you have any plans, Ramtin?

Kind of. What are you going to do? I have to say this. I like to celebrate 4th of July, but I don't like crowds. So no fireworks for you? I'm going to try to watch the fireworks from far away, from people. Okay, fair enough, fair enough. You need barbecue.

Yeah, I'd definitely like to have a barbecue. I'll probably go to a friend's house for a barbecue, but try to watch it from far away. That's my whole thing. Stay away from crowds. Okay, that's completely understandable. Obviously, this holiday is to celebrate United States independence. And one song that embodies the spirit of it is the Star Spangled Banner. It's, of course, the national anthem.

But there are also plenty of other unofficial anthems that have resonated with different people for different reasons. NPR Music has been collecting these American anthems over the past year. These are songs on themes like patriotism, war, civil rights, women's empowerment, and teenage rebellion. What would your American anthem be? Putting me on the spot here. Oh, you know what? My go-to song when I want to get pumped up, but it's also from one of my all-time favorite movies, Remember the Titans, Ain't No Mountain High Enough.

You know that song? Of course. Ain't no mountain high enough. That's a good rendition. No, it's great. It's like the song you listen to when you don't feel well or you feel down or something. It instantly makes you feel better. A true American classic.

And today we're going to share three stories from NPR Music's American Anthem series that highlight the origins of songs that also became American classics. Up first, the battle hymn of the Republic. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. When Johnny Cash introduced this song on his TV show in 1969, he made a mistake. Here's a song that was reportedly sung by both sides in the Civil War. The song does have roots in the Civil War, but it was written as a pro-union anti-slavery song. Here's NPR's Andrew Limbaugh with the history. I should go easy on Johnny Cash for flubbing the history of the battle hymn of the Republic. I had it wrong too. I didn't even know the song had ties to the Civil War up until embarrassingly recently,

because I, and maybe you if you grew up with a similar flavor of Christianity, only sang it at church. Little did I know the song was being used to root for college football teams, go Georgia. As an anthem for labor unions. Evangelist Billy Graham, who helped popularize the song Among Christians, even took it to the Russian Army Chorus in 1992. It's a good march. I mean, it's just the right cadence to march along if you're marching at a picket line or marching down the street carrying signs. That's Sparky Rucker, a folk singer and Civil War historian who performs a show of Civil War music called Blue and Gray in Black and White with his wife Rhonda.

It sets your heart to really get your blood going and that you can slay dragons. Dragons are relative, though. Anita Bryant used to sing the song at anti-gay rallies, and it's also been used to justify racism. On the flip side, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous mountaintop speech the day before he was killed in 1968, and it ends like this. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. like this. How people relate to patriotism is kind of how they come into the battle hymn. That's Professor Brigida Johnson, an ethnomusicologist at the University of South Carolina who teaches in the schools of music and African-American studies. After Martin Luther King

Jr. died, she says his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, made the song about him and his truth of the civil rights movement. Johnson says this anthem is all about what you bring to it. For example, when you see your white nationalists kind of digging deep into their heavy patriotism messages, they bring up things like the Star Spangled Banner and the Battle Hymn, and it becomes their battle cry just as easy as it could become the battle cry for Ebenezer in Atlanta. And that flexibility is by design. Quick history. It's the middle of the Civil War. Union soldiers are sitting around a campfire, goofing off, singing songs, and they're ribbing on this one guy.

One of the members of the singing group is a Scottish immigrant named John Brown. Not that John Brown, says Harvard professor John Stauffer. We're not talking about the famous abolitionist, just a regular soldier. Stauffer is the co-author of the book The Battle Hymn of the Republic, a biography of the song that marches on. He says the soldiers were making up lyrics to the tune of an old hymn, Say Brothers Will You Meet Us. So when they start making up songs to pass the time, comrades needle him and say, you can't be John Brown. John Brown's dead. And then another soldier would add, but his body's a molder in the grave. John Brown's body lies a molder in the grave.

So even though it's about a regular soldier, the ghost of the abolitionist looms large and a song called John Brown's Body is born. It becomes super popular among Union soldiers for a few reasons. It's easy to sing, the melody is simple, the lyrics are easy to remember, and most importantly, it glorified the righteous fight against slavery. The stars of heaven, they are looking kindly down on the grave of old John Brown. A couple years later, a well-to-do, highly educated poet from New York named Julia Ward Howe comes to Washington, D.C. with her minister to visit Union troops.

As they do so, Confederates attack. But the Union troops defend and impress Howe. Her minister pushes her to rewrite John Brown's body. Rewrite it and elevate it for a kind of educated audience. John Stauffer says Julie Ward Howe was not interested in creating an anthem. She wanted to make capital A art with metaphor and symbolism so she could join the ranks of the better known writers of her time. Symbolism was seen by Hawthorne or Melville, Thoreau, that part of the way in which they were understood as great writers was their use of

symbolism. So how ditched many of the crowdsourced lyrics of John Brown's body like let's hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree. But that crowdsourcing is what made the song so popular in the first place. That and the starring melody of the original hymn. Brigida Johnson says African-American units picked up the melody as their anthem. He also had this marching song of First Arkansas being sung by black Union soldiers. We need to show Jeff Davis how the African can fight as we go marching on. We're done with hoeing cotton. We're done with hoeing corn. We're colored Yankee soldiers now. Sure as you're born. That's folk singer Sparky Rucker again, whose versions of these songs we've been hearing. He says that when he sings the Black Union Soldiers version of the song, even in the South, where, in his words,

the wounds of the Civil War are still fresh, everyone sings along. Even a lot of my unreconstructed Southerners in the audience will sing along with me because we've also sung some of their songs. Rucker says everyone also sings the Julia Ward Howe version, which eventually won, getting published by The Atlantic magazine in 1862 and becoming canonized. And while it does transcend centuries and cultures, Brigida Johnson is quick to point out that it is, at the end of the day, a war song. So the kumbaya moment will not be happening across the aisles because of this song,

because it's really about supporting whatever your perspective is on freedom or liberation and having God as the person who's ordaining what we're doing. And glory hallelujah about that. That was NPR's Andrew Limpong with the history of the battle hymn of the Republic. Coming up, how Nina Simone created an known as a singer, songwriter, and classically trained pianist. In that decade, she also became known as an activist. Here's NPR's Noelle King with the story of how Young, Gifted, and Black became an American anthem. We're going to start in 1963 with the murder of Medgar Evers. Evers was killed by a Klansman, shot in the back in his own driveway in Mississippi. Then three months later,

in Birmingham, Alabama, four little girls were killed in a church bombing. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. gave their eulogy. They died between the sacred walls of the Church of God. And they were discussing the eternal meaning of love. In response to the grief and outrage, Simone wrote a powerful song with unsparing lyrics and a provocative title, Mississippi Goddamn. Alabama's got me so upset. Tennessee made me lose my rest. And everybody knows about Mississippi, God damn! Fast forward to 1968 and you've got the scene for today's American anthem.

The Black Power movement was rising. Pride in being black and beautiful was expressed by afros and fists raised in the air. Nina Simone captures this moment of joy in Black identity. Young, gifted, and black Oh, what a lovely, precious dream To be young, gifted, and black Simone wrote the song for children, but it became an anthem for adults, too. To Be Young, Gifted, and Black was a dedication to Nina Simone's friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote A Raisin in the Sun.

Hansberry was the first black woman to have a play performed on Broadway. She and Simone bonded over civil rights and radical politics. And then in January 1965, Hansberry died of cancer at the age of 34. A few months before she died, Hansberry had told a group of student essay winners, you are young, gifted, and black. Those words stuck in Nina Simone's head. Here she is. This will sound very strange, but not to people who are really hip.

She kept trying to tell me something. And I remember getting a feeling in my body. And I said, that's it. To be young, gifted, and black. That's all. And sat down at the piano at that moment and made up a tune. I'm of my joy of today Is that we can all be proud to say To be young, different, and back

Simone wrote the music. The words came from her band leader, Weldon Irvine. Simone told him, make it simple, to quote, make black children all over the world feel good about themselves forever. Young, Gifted and Black caught on, and other artists quickly recorded it, including soul singer Donny Hathaway in 1970. We are young, gifted, gifted singer Donny Hathaway, in 1970. Aretha Franklin released her version in 1972.

We invited two contemporary artists, African American women from very different backgrounds, to share their thoughts on this American anthem. My name is Michelle Ndegi-Ochello, and I'm a musician and a parent. Michelle Ndegi-Ochello is a 10-time Grammy nominee. She released the album A Dedication to Nina Simone in 2012. She says when she was growing up, there was a real need for this song. It's the first time I heard those words said about young Black people. You know, being of color, you did not feel that you were gifted, and especially if you're Black. The first person to play the song for her was a white woman, her middle school teacher. In D.C., music wasn't so segregated. I mean, I love Burt Bacharach,

and I grew up listening to The Carpenters, but she also played me, like, Bob Marley, Salif Keita. It was the beginning of my awareness of Africa. And it was somewhere in one of those classes, or Black History Month, where she was like, we're going to try to perform this song in a choir setting. As time passed, though, it became less popular. My name is Somi and I'm a vocalist and a writer.

Last year, Nina Simone's profile was raised again when she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Somi honored her in her own way in 2018. She performed Simone's songs at Lincoln Center in New York City. Somi was born in Illinois. Her parents were immigrants from Rwanda and Uganda. They encouraged her to take pride in her African heritage. She didn't really need a song for that, which made me wonder if she thinks this song is still necessary. I think it is important just to have these messages that tell young Black people that they are of value. When you look at the March of Our Lives that recently happened in Washington and Naomi Wadler coming up there and feeling as though she had to speak.

I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African American girls whose stories don't make the front page of every national newspaper. That speaks to the need for black youth, you know, to be seen, to be heard. It's an inner anthem, I think, is existing on a subconscious level. In 2012, Michelle Indeghiacello, who has two sons, invited the singer Cody Chestnut to perform Young, Gifted, and Black on her album, A Dedication to Nina Simone. This was during the time of the whole Trayvon Martin incident.

And I was affected as a mother. And so it just really, for some reason, I felt should be voiced with a strong male presence. And that's why I chose Cody Chestnut. When you're young, gifted and black Cody Chestnut. I hope it only makes you ask the question, why did that song have to be written? Nina Simone said she wanted this song to inspire Black children to feel good about themselves forever. Maybe that's a lot to ask for one song, but that message is as important as it was when to be young, gifted, and black first became an American anthem.

That was NPR's Noelle King with the story of Young, Gifted, and Black. Coming up, how one song became an anthem of cultural pride and resistance for generations of Mexican-Americans. After this. When the song La Bamba hit number one in the United States, it was the first Spanish song to ever do that. NPR's Shirin Marisol Maragi looked at the history of this classic American song with Afro-Mexican roots. La Bamba. It was the first song in Spanish to hit number one in the United States. But not this Richie Valens version. No, the year was 1987, and the band that took La Bamba to the top of the charts was Los Lobos. For our series, American Anthem,

I'm going to spend the next few minutes talking about why this Spanish-language song with roots in Veracruz, Mexico, is still an enduring American anthem. We'll begin in the present, or at least the not-too-distant past. On an unusually cold and overcast Saturday in October last year, counter-protesters faced down neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

And the counter-protesters brought a sound system. And it was a nice one. It was loud. I'm afraid we may have damaged their hearing. Chris Irwin was one of the organizers. He's a public defender in Knoxville and says they use that sound system to drown out the speakers on the other side of the street with music. There's this guy we call Angry Santa. And Angry Santa is a KKK guy, unabashed. We've seen him at other rallies. And he starts talking about rounding up all you degenerate whores. And it just occurred to me, I was like, let's try La Bamba. The absolute best counter protest I have ever seen. Trevor Noah saw a video of the rally online and talked about it on The Daily Show. A white supremacist gets up to give a speech, and he doesn't get punched.

Someone just starts playing La Bamba. People were dancing on our side. And think about that. Did Charlottesville, they murdered that woman with a car. They were violent. They came in with clubs and fire. And we had a thousand people show up, African-Americans, immigrants, Hispanics, brave people. And they're dancing and laughing at them. Even one of the Nazis can't help but dance along. Look at him. That guy totally forgets he's wearing a Nazi helmet. Yeah, he's like, yeah, we're the supreme race, but that is the supreme beat. Come on. And he was dancing at a Nazi rally with KKK members

to a song that was multicultural by its very nature and sound and beat. And when you hit a song and something like that happens, you know on a cellular level, this is something that's right. For right now, this is it. As right as La Bamba is for these times, it's got a long, long history. Story goes that a 17-year-old Mexican-American kid from the San Fernando Valley named Richie Valens probably heard this version of La Bamba growing up, sung by Andres Huesca. It was popularized during the golden age of Mexican cinema, around the 1940s.

If there's any one song that represents the Americas, it is this one song, La Bamba. Luis Valdez wrote and directed the 1987 film La Bamba about the life and death of Richie Valens. Valdez still doesn't know the exact meaning of the title of Valens' most famous song, but he did lots of research for the film and thinks it's a reference to something he calls Umbamba from Africa. And it was a beat, it was a sound, and that landed on the shores of Veracruz. Enslaved Africans were brought a few hundred years ago to Veracruz, Mexico, and because cultural fusion has long been a means of survival,

African, indigenous, and Spanish traditions were all mashed up. And out of that mashup, a musical style was created called Son Jarocho. La Bamba is a Son Jarocho song. This strong to La Bamba is a Son Jarocho song. This strum to La Bamba. Alexandro Hernandez is an ethnomusicologist at UCLA and a musician himself. Listen to it when I mute it. Hernandez says that rhythm is the beating heart of Son Jarocho. It's there. It's like embedded in the strum itself too because it is that

Afro-Caribbean connection that's been there for hundreds of years mixed in with a little bit of the Español and First Nations. Richie Valens took that style of folk music from Latin America and turned it into an anthem for the United States of America. His real name was Richard Valenzuela. He came of age when segregation was still legal in parts of the U.S., and kids were punished in school for speaking Spanish. Valen's version of La Bamba was actually a B-side, but it became a surprise hit, climbing to number 22 on the charts in 1959.

Luis Valdez says Valens took that song to a whole new level. And to a whole new audience, because that audience was young at that time. They were teenagers, and they were hearing rock and roll. They weren't hearing Mexican folk music. They were hearing rock and roll. They weren't hearing Mexican folk music. They were hearing rock and roll. Rock and roll. A unique musical mashup that, like Son Jarocho, also has roots in slavery and colonization. A sound of survival now totally synonymous with the USA. And Luis Valdez's film La Bamba brought that song to new audiences three decades later using a version by a band from East Los Angeles called

Los Lobos. The Los Lobos version of La Bamba topped the charts by starting with rock and roll and ending with Son Jarocho. My parents are a big fan of Los Lobos, so I just remember hearing the Los Lobos version a lot in the car. Leah Rose Gallegos is a member of a band from northeast LA called Las Cafeteras, and they've come to represent La Bamba's future, taking the song in a new direction, mixing Son Jarocho with influences from hip-hop culture. I met up with the band at their first practice space, Gallegos' parents' house in Highland Park,

where they played me their version. Now, Richie Vallon sang that to dance La Bamba, you need a little grace. Denise Carlos sings, Carlos says, Son Jarocho is a style of music where the lyrics are always changing. That's encouraged. It's like freestyling in hip hop. So La Bamba is constantly evolving. She and bandmate Hector Flores say their lyrics to the song represent how they're feeling right now.

I will never be authentic to Mexico. I will never be authentic to this idea of Americanism. But I still belong and I still am valid. And our culture as Chicanos and Pochas is still valid. We're not from Veracruz. We're from right here. We LA kids. And we speak Spanish just as bad as we speak English.

You know? And like that allowed us to then be proud of La Bamba versus, or that's just how they box me up. And La Bamba follows them everywhere, on vacation even. Leah Rose Gallego says she was traveling in Thailand with her husband, who's also a member of the group, and they were invited to a karaoke birthday party. Everyone there knew they were American, and everyone had two requests. Do an Elvis song and do La Bamba. And we were like, okay, let's do it. Which one did you rock better? Oh, La Bamba, for sure. I didn't grow up with that one. Like that, huh? It's La Bamba, señores.

It's La Bamba, señores. La melodía que nos pone en el alma. Que nos pone en el alma mucha alegría. Y arriba, y arriba. Bandmate Hector Flores says he loves that story because it's just one example of how people around the world think a Spanish language song made famous by Chicanos is an all American anthem, especially right now. You know, and like that's so dope to me. This song survived slavery, colonialism, and you're damn sure it's going to survive Trump because it lives within us

and we invite everybody to also make it yours. All my people in the place tonight Everybody come and sing along Like this, hey That was NPR's Shereen Marisol Maragi with the history of La Bamba.

Thanks again to our friends at NPR Music and if you want to listen to more stories like this check out their American Anthem series. Marisol Maragi with the history of La Bamba. Thanks again to our friends at NPR Music. And if you want to listen to more stories like this, check out their American Anthem series. Thanks for listening and happy 4th of July. Hey! Que viva la raza! Listen, baby Ain't no mountain high

Ain't no valley low Ain't no river Okay, that's my American Anthem. Hold on.