Throughline - American history through song

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

There are many ways to look at and understand American history. In this series, we’ve shared stories about how this country was founded and how it continues to evolve over time. Today, a journey through American history, with the sounds of music. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is America in Pursuit, a limited-run series from NPR and ThruLine. I'm Randaab del Fattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the U.S. that began 250 years ago. Throughout this series, we've brought you stories from all corners of American life, since the founders stated their intentions for this nation. We've talked about the creation of the voting system in the U.S. We've shared firsthand experiences of the Great Depression, and we've looked at the American economy. Today we're doing something a little different.

We're going to listen to some music, to help us explore the past, of course. You can look at any point in American history and understand what was happening through the sounds that we're developing at that time. I could borrow a phrase from Questlove, which is music is history, you know, because it is. In my world and in my experience, it is,

That is really how I understand the scope of time. This is scholar and classical pianist Laura Downs. She's been working on her own AP250 series with NPR, looking at the last 250 years through music. I realized that classical musicians start our training very young. I mean, by the time I was four years old, I was already a musician. That understanding of the world by playing music that's 2 and 300 years old. For me, 250 years, I'm like, yeah, that's where I live all the time.

When you think about it, there really is no better through line to history than music, how songs, the very music notes, are passed down, sampled and recycled, and sometimes turned into something completely new. Not only do they get passed down, but they get passed around. They move among different sectors and with the constant flow into this country, too, there's just been this never-stopping evolution. Today on the show, we're going to hear some of Laura's series, three stories featuring writers, musicians, and scholars about three songs that have defined America. Amazing Grace, my days have been so wondrous free and get happy. What I always say about these songs is that, like, my great grandmother knew this song and your great grandmother knew this song. And they might have lived totally different lives in very different places. And that song, like, connected them across time and point.

place. And I think that that is the superpower of music is that these songs, they illustrate that our journeys have been shared and our troubles have been shared and, you know, that we have worked together in many ways to bring this country to the present day. That's coming up after a quick break. Laura Downs has been traveling around the country talking to scholars, historians, and musicians with music as her guide. The first piece we're going to hear from Laura is an interview with author Iman Perry

about the song, Amazing Grace. John Newton, an English clergyman, poet, slave trader and eventual abolitionists. He writes this song in the early 1770s. Yes. And it's kind of never gone away. It's remarkably resilient. There are, I think, over 3,000 recordings

of this song in the Library of Congress. And I think every time I hear it, I do ask myself, what is this thing called grace? Grace is that unearned gift, something divine within that you are born with. And there's sort of a story that the lyrics are a direct response to Newton's experience of being horrified

while working aboard a slave ship. So I think we can read in the song this sense of encountering the lowest point of devastation and still having a sense of the divine and possibility and maybe why the song has a particular power in the U.S. context, this place that's made of dreams and also their deferrals. Grace as forgiveness and redemption, but also this second chances thing. We don't often think about the fact that the first several generations of enslaved people,

in this country hadn't necessarily adopted Christianity. And so it makes sense that then in the early 19th century, this song would begin to move into the black community as Christianity did. It really emphasized the vision of freedom. And so the song, just being a song that comes from the heart and mind of someone who's becoming an abolitionist, it becomes a song that can speak to the descendants of those who are in the hold of the ship. For me, I'm not a religious person.

I define faith as belief in my fellow humans, I think. And this song speaks so clearly to that. It's open to interpretation. It is. It really is. And I think that's part of what's so wonderful about all of the varying musical interpretations of it. It was grace that taught my heart to fear. And grace, my fears read.

This project started, you know, as a reflection on this 250th anniversary of the country so quickly. I understood that this was not nearly as much about the past as it is about the future. Oh, yeah. And that history is built on the future. Yes. Because everybody who's ever been a first generation American, that is what they believed in. My favorite version is Aretha Franklin's 1972. And without question, that moment was about the future, even though she was.

is drawing on tradition in order to sort of propel her voice into what was coming. I think Amazing Grace is really one of the clearest examples of this song that means so many different things to so many people, gets passed around, doesn't stay property of anybody. The way that this particular song is available to Americans is a tradition. Yes. I think there's something really meaningful about trying to find the kind of resonance with each person who's sitting across from you. And that does not mean agreement necessarily on anything.

But there is value in trying to figure it out. And in order to do that, you actually have to leave open possibility. Yes, always. As part of her series, Lara also hosted some live events across the country. Next up, we're going to hear her conversation from one of those events with historian Jill Lepoor. I played this song on a snowy night in a 200-year-old barn in Brattlebro in front of a capacity audience. It's a new arrangement of My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free, Francis Hopkinson wrote the original in 1759 in Philadelphia. My days have been so wondrous free.

It's often called the first American song, because it might just be the first documented, formally notated song written on America. soil. Although there were songs long before that by indigenous peoples, and the music Africans brought here in bondage, songs that dreamed of freedom. I came to this old barn to talk with historian Jill Lepore. She's written a 900-page history of the United States, and she told us that even before the revolution, America was already a melting pot. 18th century Atlantic seaboard culture was a crazy mix. probably about the most sort of ethnically, racially, linguistically pluralist that the country has ever been. Philadelphia was the biggest city. Very English in many ways, but also quite Dutch

and a lot of Irish and very German. And then the enslaved population was sizable, but so was the free black population, because by 1759 when Hopkinson was writing, already, Quakers had condemned and denounced slavery. So a really wonderfully vibrant culture. Yeah, the music really starts to mingle right away. People brought what they had when they came here. We all carry songs with us and Africans brought their songs with them. The seeds of traditional black spirituals like nobody knows the trouble I've seen. Just hearing this music and thinking about, about how much was suppressed. To think of the music as surviving

is just an incredible testament to the vitality and insistence of the human spirit's need for beauty. But I think there's another legacy of that era of great brutality that we also tend to forget. And that is, it's not an accident that the world's first modern democracy is born in a part of the world

that is one of the last places where human bondage exists. In fact, it is the cries for freedom, the insistence that enslaved Africans make, and the insistence on sovereignty that indigenous peoples makes. And out of that emerges this discourse of rights, you know, that gets us all the way down to the Bill of Rights. And the awareness of an inexcusability of tyranny over other people. That's where the American idea is born in that crucible of violence. Is this encouraging, or is this... Just, no, I really struggle with this.

It's so hard for us to wrap our heads around this moment. To think about this founding promise, we certainly haven't achieved it. Is the idea just that we're still in the thick of it? 250 years in, and the road is still bumpy. But the only way is forward. Jill Lepore says we definitely wouldn't want to go back. There's nothing romantic to me about the 18th century. You would die in childbirth, your children would die in infancy.

You would live to 24. No. What is really extraordinary is the capacity for the creation of beautiful work and the devising of ingenious ideas in spite of the incredible cruelty and suffering of daily living. And today, in this anniversary year, the American melting pot of art and ideas is still resilient. At the end, Jill Lepur left us with a lesson from those hard times when America was young. The generosity of spirit around what it is to lift one another up is an ideal of the revolution that we very often forget and we need in this moment.

So we all bundled up and headed out into the snowy night with new insights about our history and some ideas about how to build our future together. The last piece we're going to play of Lara's is about the song Get Happy. It was written during a particularly painful period in our country's history. And that's a theme Laura found in her reporting for this series,

the idea of smiling through the pain being a part of the DNA of American songs. I've become so aware of this role that American music has always taken, of injecting that joy and that optimism. And once you start to look at that, you realize how all of the happiest songs have honestly come from the hardest times. Here's Laura's conversation with the writer John McQuarter, the linguists and columnist for the New York Times. Harold Arlen wrote the song Get Happy, sometime in the fall of 1929,

within weeks of the October stock market crash that launched the Great Depression. By the next year, the song was in the top ten on the pop charts. It's such a hummable, optimistic tune in such a disastrous time. And I'm imagining the comfort and energy that came with that song playing over the radio into America's kitchens and living rooms. The song became a hit when the whole country had just fallen to pieces. Mickey Mouse is dancing around and there are these songs that go, but it really was kind of a therapy. The phrase, get happy, comes from the black gospel music tradition. It's a reference to receiving the Holy Spirit with that, you know, ecstatic singing that happens in a gospel church service.

When I think about Harold Arlen, choosing the music, that title for the song, it really makes me think about the origins of so much of our American music, which comes from those Negro spirituals and work songs that were an outlet for expression and to imagine a better life. Yeah, it's interesting with Arlen. He was somebody who Ethel Waters called the Blackest White Man I Ever knew, and so he had this feel. And it was Ted Kohler, his lyricist, who actually came up with this Get Happy, I'm sure, with the encouragement of Arlen, because he would have probably known the phrase Get Happy. And, I mean, the whole lyric of that song is really specifically about, you know, get ready for the judgment day.

It's kind of impersonating. Kind of a spiritual. They were really channeling something real. So that Get Happy feels like such a black song that I don't think any black person would feel inauthentic singing it. That's one that just joins America together. Forget your troubles and just get happy. Better chase all you cares away. Sing Hallelujah.

I hate to bring Arlen into this, but they had this huge pop hit and probably, you know, both of them bought houses on the basis of it, whereas there were all of these black composers who could have written the same sort of thing. That just has to be said. Speaking of time and place, in these hard times, there are choices that you have to make about the role that you take as, you know, a dancing mouse, the role that you take in our society. Do you want to chronicle the hardship and sort of interpret this moment? And you do? Or do you accept the job of being an entertainer? And do you kind of try to move past your own feelings and try to make that thing that makes other people feel better? What do you think?

I'm asking you as a professional musician. Well, I mean, I think I wiggle around with it. I mean, honestly, I think it depends on the day. I'm thinking about one artist who's absolutely chosen to be a spokesperson for joy, and I think that his whole heart and soul is in it. And that's John Batiste. And, you know, since he was a kid busking on the subways, his message is really come together, experience joy collectively. And the music is part of that.

He had a song in 2021 called We Are. We are. And what he's doing with that song is he's evoking the ancestors and their persistent faith in the power of joy. But it's also a song to rally us in our own times of trouble. The kind of joy that he pervays, there's a little part of me that always thinks of it is a bit of opposed, and I'm wrong. Sometimes I'm a little bit afraid of those calls for joy, maybe because I am a slightly depressive person, maybe because I think too much.

I think that when things are really dark, joy isn't easy. Part of being American is that focus on the great day coming, the idea that we are an experiment that's always going on. It's human to try to make the best of the worst. That's how our hormones work in our brain. We as Americans, we center joy. It's in our founding promise, the pursuit of happiness. That's it for this week's America in Pursuit. Join us next week when we hear stories of protests in America

with NPR's ongoing AP250 series. The police came and they shouted and they got in people's face and no one budged. That's next week. And stick around after the credits for something a little special. A short story about how one tiny accident created a new, big sound. This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadam with help from Amy Padula and edited by Liana Simstrom with support from the ThruLine Production Team. Music by Ramtinada-Blui and his band, Drop Electric.

Special thanks to Julia Redpath, Irene Noguchi, Yolanda Sanguani, Casey Minor, and Lindsay McKenna. I'm Randa Abd al-Defat-Dagh. Before we go, here's NPR's Jennifer Ludden with one final story about an important moment in American music history. In a glass case at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History sits Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet. Notable for so many reasons,

not least of which is its angled bell, which was kind of the trademark. We'll get back to why the bell points up. Music curator Crystal Klingenberg, says the man and his instrument were an American original. And that's one of many examples of where American entertainment has just burst forth with something new and special and reached the whole world. In the 1940s, Gillespie, with his signature puffed out cheeks, helped forge a new jazz era. Edgier, faster, complex rhythms called B-BBOB.

The State Department enlisted Gillespie and others as Cold War Jazz ambassadors to win hearts and minds. to win hearts and minds abroad, even as they faced racism at home. In 1955, after Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald played to an integrated audience in Houston, they were arrested on trumped-up charges of gambling. Klingenberg says the photos of them in jail are incredible. Dizzy's kind of hanging out, being dizzy. You see Ella Fitzgerald in the most beautiful, elegant gown. Like, she's not meant to be there in the lockup.

Why is she there? Despite such pressures, on stage, Gillespie was charming, playful, funny. That sense of fun came through when, in 1953, his trumpet first got bent. Accidents happened on stage, and it fell. He picked it up to play and decided he liked the strange news sound, so he had his trumpets custom made that way. As testament to his nearly six-decade career, Klingenberg first saw Gillespie as a child, watching Sesame Street. He was that warm kind of jazz grandpa.

A circle of kids, bop and sway, entranced by the gray-haired man with a funny-looking trumpet. Jennifer Lutton, NPR News.