Saturday, July 5, 2014

The sound of freedom

There’s a lot of music associated with Independence Day—Sousa marches (I’m rather partial to “The Washington Post”), various country anthems (yeah—not going there), Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”… And I don’t think any Fourth of July concert can end with anything but “God Bless America”.

Well—that or the 1812 Overture; which technically was written by a Russian and is about a war in which the U.S. did not fight. But you get to fire cannons and shoot off fireworks at the finale, which pretty much makes it ideal for closing out an American patriotic event.

But here’s one song that really encapsulates for me the whole notion of the new, independent nation and its subsequent history:




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