in my mind's zen garden

Ray Charles: America The Beautiful

      Share    October 19, 2008 | Music

 

It’s getting quite late and I need to get to bed, so here is the last “discovered” video from YouTube, a live performance of none other than the late great Ray Charles (may he rest in peace) singing his famous rendition of America The Beautiful!

LIVE: At The McCallum Theater in Palm Desert, California.

The words are by Katharine Lee Bates, an English professor at Wellesley College. In 1893, Bates had taken a train trip to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to teach a short summer school session at Colorado College, and several of the sights on her trip found their way into her poem:

• The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the “White City” with its promise of the future contained within its alabaster buildings.
• The wheat fields of Kansas, through which her train was riding on July 4.
• The majestic view of the Great Plains from atop Pikes Peak.

On that mountain, the words of the poem started to come to her, and she wrote them down upon returning to her hotel room at the original Antlers Hotel. The poem was initially published two years later in The Congregationalist, to commemorate the Fourth of July. It quickly caught the public’s fancy. Amended versions were published in 1904 and 1913.

Several existing pieces of music were adapted to the poem. The Hymn tune composed in 1895 by Samuel A. Ward, was generally considered the best music as early as 1910 and is still the popular tune today. Ward had been similarly inspired. The tune came to him while he was on a ferryboat trip from Coney Island back to his home in New York City after a leisurely summer day, and he immediately wrote it down. Ward died in 1903, not knowing the national stature his music would attain. Miss Bates was more fortunate, as the song’s popularity was well-established by her death in 1929.

Posted by Randomguru | Comments (View Comments)

Tags: America The Beautiful, Ray Charles