American history through song

There are many ways to look at and understand American history. In this series, we’ve shared stories about how this country was founded and how it continues to evolve over time. Today, a journey through American history, with the sounds of music. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and Throughline. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the US that began 250 years ago. Throughout this series, we've brought you stories from all corners of American life since the founders stated their intentions for this nation. We've talked about the creation of the voting system in the US. We've shared firsthand experiences of the Great Depression. And we've looked at the American economy. Today, we're doing something a little different. We're going to listen to some music to help us explore the past, of course.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  You can look at any point in American history and understand what was happening through the sounds that were developing at that time. I could borrow a phrase from Questlove, which is, "Music is history." You know, because it is. In my world and in my experience, it is. That is really how I understand the scope of time.

• 1:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is scholar and classical pianist Laura Downs. She's been working on her own AP250 series with NPR, looking at the last 250 years through music.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  I realized that classical musicians start our training very young. I mean, by the time I was four years old, I was already a musician. That understanding of the world by playing music that's 200 and 300 years old. For me, 250 years, I'm like, yeah, that's where I live all the time.

• 1:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  When you think about it, there really is no better Throughline to history than music. How songs, the very music notes, are passed down, sampled and recycled, and sometimes turned into something completely new.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Not only do they get passed down, but they get passed around. They move among different sectors. And with the constant flow into this country, too, there's just been this never-stopping evolution.

• 2:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  Today on the show, we're going to hear some of Laura's series. Three stories featuring writers, musicians, and scholars about three songs that have defined America. "Amazing Grace," "My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free," and "Get Happy."

• 2:28Speaker 02

  What I always say about these songs is that like, my great-grandmother knew this song and your great-grandmother knew this song. And they might have lived totally different lives in very different places. And that song like connected them across time and place. And I think that that is the superpower of music, is that these songs, they illustrate that our journeys have been shared and our troubles have been shared. And, you know, that we have worked together in many ways to bring this country to the present day.

• 3:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's coming up after a quick break.

• 3:14Speaker 00

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• 4:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  Laura Downs has been traveling around the country talking to scholars, historians, and musicians with music as her guide. The first piece we're going to hear from Laura is an interview with author Iman Perry about the song "Amazing Grace."

• 5:01Speaker 02

  John Newton, an English clergyman, poet, slave trader, and eventual abolitionist.

• 5:06Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  He writes this song in the early 1770s.

• 5:10Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  And it's kind of never gone away.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  Yes, remarkably resilient.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  There are, I think, over 3,000 recordings of this song in the Library of Congress.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  And I think every time I hear it, I do ask myself, what is this thing called grace?

• 5:39Speaker 04

  Grace is that unearned gift, right? Something divine within that you are born with. And there's sort of a story that the lyrics are a direct response to Newton's experience of being horrified while working aboard a slave ship. So I think we can read in the song this sense of encountering the lowest point of devastation and still having a sense of the divine and possibility. And maybe why the song has a particular power in the US context. This place that's made of dreams and also their deferrals.

• 6:23Speaker 04

  Grace as forgiveness and redemption, but also this second chances thing. We don't often think about the fact that the first several generations of enslaved people in this country hadn't necessarily adopted Christianity. And so it makes sense that then, in the early 19th century, this song would begin to move into the Black community as Christianity did. It really emphasized the vision of freedom. And so the song, just being a song that comes from the heart and mind of someone who's becoming an abolitionist, it becomes a song that can speak to the descendants of those who are in the hold of the ship.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  For me, I'm not a religious person. I define faith as belief in my fellow humans.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  And this song speaks so clearly to that. It's open to interpretation, isn't it?

• 7:12Speaker 04

  It is. It really is. And I think that's part of what's so wonderful about all of the varying musical interpretations of it.

• 7:20Speaker 05

  It was grace that taught my heart to fear. Embrace my fears relieved.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  This project started as a reflection on this 250th anniversary of the country. So quickly, I understood that this was not nearly as much about the past as it is about the future.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  Mm. Oh, yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  And that history is built on the future.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Because everybody who's ever been a first-generation American, that is what they believed in.

• 7:56Speaker 04

  My favorite version is Aretha Franklin's 1972. And without question, that moment was about the future, even though she was drawing on tradition in order to propel her voice

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  into what was coming.

• 8:11Speaker 05

  And rain, the love we leave.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  I think "Amazing Grace" is really one of the clearest examples of this song that means so many different things to so many people, gets passed around, doesn't stay property of anybody.

• 8:44Speaker 04

  The way that this particular song is available to Americans is a tradition.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  I think there's something really meaningful about trying to find the kind of resonance with each person who's sitting across from you. And that does not mean agreement necessarily on anything, but there is value in trying to figure it out. And in order to do that, you actually have to leave open possibility.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Yes, always.

• 9:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  As part of her series, Laura also hosted some live events across the country. Next up, we're going to hear her conversation from one of those events with historian Jill Lepore.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  I played this song on a snowy night in a 200-year-old barn in Brattleboro in front of a capacity audience. It's a new arrangement of "My days have been so wondrous free." Frances Hopkinson wrote the original in 1759 in Philadelphia.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  It's often called the first American song because it might just be the first documented, formally-notated song written on American soil. Although there were songs long before that by indigenous peoples, and the music Africans brought here in bondage, songs that dreamed of freedom. I came to this old barn to talk with historian Jill Lepore. She's written a 900-page history of the United States, and she told us that even before the Revolution, America was already a melting pot.

• 11:04Speaker 06

  18th-century Atlantic seaboard culture was a crazy mix, probably about the most ethnically, racially, linguistically pluralist that the country has ever been. Philadelphia was the biggest city, very English in many ways, but also quite Dutch, and a lot of Irish, and very German. And then the enslaved population was sizable, but so was the free Black population, because by 1759, when Hopkins was writing, already Quakers had condemned and denounced slavery. So a really wonderfully vibrant culture.

• 11:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, the music really starts to mingle right away. People brought what they had when they came here. We all carry songs with us, and Africans brought their songs with them.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  The seeds of traditional Black spirituals, like "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen."

• 12:12Speaker 06

  Just hearing this music and thinking about how much was suppressed.

• 12:18Speaker 06

  To think of the music as surviving is just an incredible testament to the vitality and insistence of the human spirit's need for beauty.

• 12:30Speaker 06

  But I think there's another legacy of that era of great brutality that we also tend to forget. And that is, it's not an accident that the world's first modern democracy is born in a part of the world that is one of the last places where human bondage exists.

• 12:49Speaker 06

  In fact, it is the cries for freedom, the insistence that enslaved Africans make, and the insistence on sovereignty that indigenous peoples make. And out of that emerges this discourse of rights, you know, that gets us all the way down to the Bill of Rights. And the awareness of inexcusableity of tyranny over other people. That's where the American idea is born, in that crucible of violence.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Is this encouraging, or is this... Just, no, I really struggle with this. It's so hard for us to wrap our heads around this moment, to think about this founding promise. We certainly haven't achieved it. Is the idea just that we're still in the thick of it?

• 13:35Speaker 02

  250 years in, and the road is still bumpy. But the only way is forward. Jill Lepore says we definitely wouldn't want to go back.

• 13:43Speaker 06

  There's nothing romantic to me about the 18th century. You would die in childbirth, your children would die in infancy. You would live to 24. No. What is really extraordinary is the capacity for the creation of beautiful work and the devising of ingenious ideas in spite of the incredible cruelty and suffering of daily living.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  And today, in this anniversary year, the American melting pot of art and ideas is still resilient. At the end, Jill Lepore left us with a lesson from those hard times when America was young.

• 14:21Speaker 06

  The generosity of spirit around what it is to lift one another up is an ideal of the revolution that we very often forget and we need in this moment.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  So we all bundled up and headed out into the snowy night with new insights about our history and some ideas about how to build our future together.

• 14:58Rund Abdelfatah?

  The last piece we're going to play of Laura's is about the song "Get Happy." It was written during a particularly painful period in our country's history. And that's a theme Laura found in her reporting for this series. The idea of smiling through the pain being a part of the DNA of American songs.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  I've become so aware of this role that American music has always taken of injecting that joy and that optimism. And once you start to look at that, you realize how all of the happiest songs have honestly come from the hardest times.

• 15:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  Here's Laura's conversation with the writer John McQuarter, the linguist and columnist for The New York Times.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Harold Arlen wrote the song "Get Happy" sometime in the fall of 1929, within weeks of the October stock market crash that launched the Great Depression. By the next year, the song was in the top 10 on the pop charts.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  It's such a hummable, optimistic tune in such a disastrous time. And I'm imagining the comfort and energy that came with that song playing over the radio into America's kitchens and living rooms.

• 16:12Speaker 07

  The song became a hit when the whole country had just fallen to pieces. Mickey Mouse is dancing around and there are these songs that go, but it really was kind of a therapy.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  The phrase "get happy" comes from the Black gospel music tradition. It's a reference to receiving the Holy Spirit with that ecstatic singing that happens in a gospel church service.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  When I think about Harold Arlen choosing that title for the song, it really makes me think about the origins of so much of our American music, which comes from those Negro spirituals and work songs that were now out there for expression and to imagine a better life.

• 16:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's interesting with Arlen. He was somebody who Ethel Waters called "the blackest white man I ever knew." And so he had this feel. And it was Ted Kohler, his lyricist, who actually came up with this "Get Happy", I'm sure with the encouragement of Arlen, because he would have probably known the phrase "get happy".

• 17:11Speaker 02

  And I mean, the whole lyric of that song, it's really specifically about, you know, get ready for the judgment day. It's kind of impersonating.

• 17:17Speaker 07

  A kind of a spiritual.

• 17:25Speaker 07

  They were really channeling something real, so that "Get Happy" feels like such a black song that I don't think any black person would feel inauthentic singing it. That's one that just joins America together.

• 17:47Speaker 07

  I hate to bring Arlen into this, but they had this huge pop hit and probably, you know, both of them bought houses on the basis of it, whereas there were all of these black composers who could have written the same sort of thing. That just has to be said.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  Speaking of time and place, in these hard times, there are choices that you have to make about the role that you take as, you know, a dancing mouse, the role that you take in our society. Do you want to chronicle the hardship and sort of interpret this moment?

• 18:14Speaker 07

  And you do.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Or do you accept the job of being an entertainer? And do you kind of try to move past your own feelings and try to make that thing that makes other people feel better?

• 18:22Speaker 07

  What do you think? I'm asking you as a professional musician.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think I wiggle around with it. I think, I mean, honestly, I think it depends on the day.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  I'm thinking about one artist who's absolutely chosen to be a spokesperson for joy, and I think that his whole heart and soul is in it, and that's John Batiste. And, you know, since he was a kid busking on the subways, his message is really, come together, experience joy collectively, and the music is part of that. He had a song in 2021 called "We Are".

• 19:05Speaker 02

  And what he's doing with that song is he's evoking the ancestors and their persistent faith in the power of joy. But it's also a song to rally us in our own times of trouble.

• 19:14Speaker 07

  The kind of joy that he pervades, there's a little part of me that always thinks of it as a bit of opposed, and I'm wrong. Sometimes I'm a little bit afraid of those calls for joy, maybe because I am a slightly depressive person, maybe because I think too much.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  I think that when things are really dark, joy isn't easy.

• 19:38Speaker 07

  Part of being American is that focus on the great day coming, the idea that we are an experiment that's always going on. It's human to try to make the best of the worst. That's how our hormones work in our brains.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  We as Americans, we center joy. It's in our founding promise, the pursuit of happiness.

• 20:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's America in Pursuit. Join us next week when we hear stories of protests in America with NPR's ongoing AP 250 series.

• 20:35Speaker 05

  The police came and they shouted and they got in people's face and no one budged.

• 20:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's next week. And stick around after the credits for something a little special, a short story about how one tiny accident created a new big sound.

• 20:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by Kiana Mogadem with help from Amy Padula and edited by Leanna Simstrom with support from the Throughline production team. Music by Ramtin Arablouei and his band, Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julia Redpath, Irene Noguchi, Yolanda Sangueni, Casey Miner, and Lindsay McKenna. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Before we go, here's NPR's Jennifer Ludden with one final story about an important moment in American music history.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  In a glass case at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History sits Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet. Notable for so many reasons, not least of which is its angled bell, which was kind of the trademark. We'll get back to why the bell points up. Music curator Kristel Klingenberg says the man and his instrument were an American original. And that's one of many examples of where American entertainment has just burst forth with something new and special and reached the whole world. In the 1940s, Gillespie, with his signature puffed-out cheeks, helped forge a new jazz

• 22:06Speaker 02

  era: edgier, faster, complex rhythms called bebop. The State Department enlisted Gillespie and others as Cold War jazz ambassadors to win hearts and minds abroad, even as they faced racism at home. In 1955, after Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald played to an integrated audience in Houston, they were arrested on trumped-up charges of gambling. Klingenberg says the photos of them in jail are incredible. Dizzy's kind of hanging out, being dizzy. You see Ella Fitzgerald in the most beautiful, elegant gown, like, she's not meant to be there in the lockup. Why is she there?

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Despite such pressures, onstage, Gillespie was charming, playful, funny. That sense of fun came through when, in 1953, his trumpet first got bent. Accidents happen onstage, and it fell. He picked it up. To play and decided he liked the strange new sound. So he had his trumpets custom made that way. As testament to his nearly six decade career, Klingenberg first saw Gillespie as a child watching Sesame Street.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  He was that warm kind of jazz grandpa. A circle of kids bop and sway, entranced by the gray haired man with a funny looking trumpet. Jennifer Ludden, NPR News.

• 23:52Speaker 00

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