Bad songs for good occasions
Why do we get stuck with bad music on ceremonial occasions? If we must sing the same songs over and over, couldn’t we at least be given decent melodies? I’ll give you three examples of what I’m talking about: “The Negro National Anthem,” “The Lord’s Prayer,” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“The Negro National Anthem” (aka “Lift Every Voice and Sing”) was written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson in 1900 to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday and set to music five years later by his brother John Rosamond Johnson. The NAACP adopted the song as an anthem in 1919. No matter how many times I sing it, I can never remember the precise twists and turns in the melody. It’s like trying to follow criss-crossing paths in a forest — or like the crossroads in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy gets mixed directions from the scarecrow. The melody just doesn’t flow naturally.
Albert Hay Malotte set “The Lord’s Prayer” to music in 1935. Also known as the Pater Noster (Our Father), the prayer appears in two versions in the New Testament. The tune has come to epitomize Christian inspirational music, which is unfortunate because it probably qualifies as the worst melody of all time. The music randomly starts and stops, without any symmetry or pattern, a crazy quilt of ideas and musical motives capped by a bombastic climax.
Then we come to “The Star Spangled Banner,” consisting of words written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key set to the tune of a popular British drinking song. And it sounds like something a bunch of drunks would sing. As Belize said in “Angels in America”:
The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word “free” to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate.
The song is fine for virtuosic vocalists, but its range is beyond the capability of most of us to comfortably sing. I’ve always favored “America the Beautiful” as a much more sensible choice for our national anthem. But then good sense never seems to be a consideration in these matters.
These three songs are cherished by many people, so I’m sure to upset folks with these criticisms. But popularity has little to do with whether something merits value. I wish we had more musically worthy songs that matched the import of the occasions that mean so much us.
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