Worcester Scouts
Troop & Pack 19
Do A Good Turn Daily
Speaking of music and lyrics, today's newsletter celebrates an anniversary that is melody-related.
Nineteen years ago today -- Sept. 24, 1989 -- the lights of Broadway were dimmed in tribute to the enduring music of a great American songwriter who had died two days earlier.
His life spanned more than a century. His music has been recorded by the greatest singers of all time. His greatest patriotic song has come to be considered America's second national anthem, especially since the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
The man was Irving Berlin. The song is God Bless America.
Born in Russia on May 11, 1888, as Israel Beilin, Berlin came to the United States as an infant and grew up on New York's Lower East Side. Even though he had a great love of music, his formal education was limited. He was publishing songs by the time he was 19, and in 1911, he wrote his first big hit, Alexander's Ragtime Band.
Berlin went on to compose, by some accounts, over 1,500 songs, and movie and Broadway scores. Many of those wonderful slices of Americana would easily roll through your mind with just the mention of their titles: White Christmas, There's No Business Like Show Business, Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better, Blue Skies -- the list goes on and on.
But the most beloved of his songs, God Bless America, sat unpublished for 20 years. He wrote the song in 1918 for a show at Camp Yaphank on Long Island. He was stationed there in the Army in World War I. In 1938, the popular Kate Smith -- "America's Songbird" -- was looking for a song to perform on her radio program in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice. Berlin was asked to write a new song for the occasion, but he was stymied when he tried to come up with one. Then he remembered the anthem he had written 20 years earlier.
Miss Smith performed it for the first time on Nov. 10, 1938.
Like many Americans, I will never forget the first time I heard Kate Smith sing God Bless America. It riveted me. She recorded it for RCA the following year. Even though it has been recorded by many artists since that time and performed at countless events, as far as I am concerned, no one will ever do it as well as Kate did it. It, rightly, became her signature song.
The song enjoyed huge and immediate success, but the intensely patriotic Berlin refused to take any of the monetary rewards from his work; the song was written out of his deeply held love for his adopted country. He established the God Bless America Foundation to collect all royalties from the song's performance, with the money being distributed to the Boy and Girl Scouts of America. Today, 85 years after its composition, God Bless America continues to bless these two wonderful organizations.
Fast-forward to the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001: Our nation was in shock. We needed to have a rallying point for national mourning and action. A slow groundswell began, with God Bless America sung at several patriotic functions. After a short hiatus in response to the tragedy, major-league Baseball returned to play out the remainder of the 2001 season and the World Series. There was one major change, however. Our national pastime replaced the seventh-inning-stretch song, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, with God Bless America.
And so a whole new generation of Americans was introduced to that wonderful anthem.
Irving Berlin died at the age of 101 on Sept. 22, 1989. His 50-year career was memorialized when the lights of Broadway were dimmed the evening of Sept. 24.
But as long as patriotic Americans lift up their voices together, God Bless America will continue to shine as Irving Berlin's brightest light.
Many folks have proposed that God Bless America replace The Star-Spangled Banner as our national anthem. Did you know that both Irving Berlin and Kate Smith opposed that? Miss Smith even addressed Congress in opposition. In her 1939 recording of God Bless America, Kate recorded The Star-Spangled Banner on its flip side.
Berlin's original composition was rejected for use in the Army camp show. When he blew the dust off the song in 1938, he made a couple of changes in the lyrics. The line "Stand beside her and guide her to the right with a light from above ..." became "... through the night with a light from above." "Right" and "left" had become political designations, and Berlin didn't want the song to become politicized.
The other change? "From the green fields of Virginia to the gold fields out in Nome ..." became "From the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam..."
