Independence Day, irony-free. Have a great Fourth of July.
This Land Is Your Land; Woody Guthrie: Forget the millennial irony; this is the truth, and we're allowed to act like it. Never settle.
Good Timing; The Beach Boys: 🎶We're all learning.🎶
Saturday In the Park; Chicago: Here's to a real celebration, and a different kind of jazz fusion.
Philadelphia Freedom; Elton John: By, for, and about immigrants, whose experience should never not be this joyful. It's on us.
Free To Be You and Me; Marlo Thomas and Friends: Organ (Just listen to that intro), banjo, and string orchestra. It doesn't get more American than that.
You Go To Your Church; J.D. Crowe: Bluegrass, that most conservative of genres, is also the most traditional. Accordingly, here's a song about freedom of religion.
Crow Black Chicken; The New Lost City Ramblers: From hunger. The exultations and sorrows of growing your own food, and the fantasies born of food insecurity (🎶If I had a big frame house/Eighteen storeys high/Ev'ry storey in that house/Be packed with chicken pie🎶).
Pretty Saro; Elizabeth LaPrelle: Most of our folk songs are immigrants, too; as is this Gaelic singing style.
Dancing In the Streets; Martha and The Vandellas: A roll call of America's great cities, with an acknowledgement of the struggle. If "It doesn't matter what you wear/Just as long as you are there", then it's okay to be poor and still show up.
Black Coffee; Humble Pie: Because we're inveterate self-promoters, too. Steve Marriott's joyously confident take on the Ike and Tina Turner classic is a terrific example.
No comments:
Post a Comment