[Oe List ...] Ray Charles' "America the Beautiful"

[John Cock]

. . . You see, I always cherished America -- even if I acknowledged it
only as the too-seldom played B-side of my consciousness. Charles's
"America" invited me to turn the record over. 

Charles could do that. He had a way of cutting through the confusions
and mixed emotions and preconceptions, and reaching us at our core. The
genius that made it possible for him to universalize the blues and
spirituals and country -- anything he touched -- made it possible for
him to universalize patriotism, too. 

But if Ray Charles changed the Fourth of July with his "America the
Beautiful," he also changed the song. "God done shed His grace on thee!
He crowned thy good, yes he did, in a brotherhood." 

The shift isn't merely from Katharine Lee Bates's elegant lyric to the
black vernacular; it is a shift in meaning. 

As Kenneth Moynihan noted in a recent commentary in the Worcester
(Mass.) Telegram & Gazette, Bates penned a prayer: "[May] God shed his
grace on thee and crown thy good with brotherhood." Ray made it a fait
accompli. 

As Moynihan put it, "A fervent hope for the future has been turned into
a happy fact of the present." . . .

~Wm. Raspberry, editorial, Washington Post, today


~~~~~~~~~~~
John P. Cock  
PO Box 38432 
Greensboro NC 27438
Tel:(336)404-0660  
Fax:(336)282-1557
http://www.johnpcock.homestead.com