Sermon: “What is Your Memorial Day Music?”
by Stephanie Shute Kelsch (delivered at Second Parish in Hingham, MA
May 29, 2011)
One of the advantages of belonging to a multigenerational community like this church is how enriching it can be to share experiences and ideas with people of different backgrounds and perspectives. Each of us has lived different lives, encountered different challenges, and perhaps found our identity in different decades. In terms of a holiday like Memorial Day, however, this richness poses a challenge in how we can celebrate together. Some of our members view this holiday through the lens of participation in a particular war – perhaps as a soldier, perhaps as a protestor; perhaps as someone waiting at home, perhaps as a worker in a crucial industry. Others may view this holiday through the lens of loss –of freedoms, of innocence, of loved ones.
So when I ask you to reflect this morning on the question “What is Your Memorial Day Music?” I realize there will be many, many different answers.
For someone who doesn’t consider the origins or intent of the holiday, the answer might be some song that heralds the start of the summer season with its longer days and more leisurely pace. “Those Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer” or “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” or “Summer Breeze.”
I’m revealing my own defining decade with those choices, aren’t I?
But I don’t see how we can consider the question without considering the origins or the intent of the Memorial Day holiday. The Fourth of July – a mere six weeks away – might be the holiday for those summer season songs. That holiday is a happy, hopeful celebration of an experiment in democracy that has thus far survived many tests. Memorial Day is different. It acknowledges the price of that survival, the cost of that freedom.
In asking you about your Memorial Day music, I’m really asking you to think about the patriotic songs that somehow mean something special to you. There are many from which to choose, and we’ve already heard some of them this morning – together we’ve sung “America.” The Whitings have sung, “This Land is Your Land.”
Let’s take a few minutes to look at some of the most widely recognized patriotic songs and, as we do, please consider whether or not any of them help you answer the question, “What is Your Memorial Day Music?” And, as we started out thinking about the different perspectives of different ages on these songs, let’s take songs from different eras in our nation’s history.
The place to start is with our national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner,” (Mark plays opening bars on the piano as I speak) dating from the War of 1812 – when the United States was still a fledging country, still an uncertain experiment. You heard some information about this song in our Time for All Ages, but there are some things I didn’t mention to the children. What Francis Scott Key originally wrote was a poem. He was inspired; the poem seemed to write itself, expressing relief and pride at the ability of his young country to stand up to the mighty British military. It seemed a miracle that the enormous flag – remember it was 42’ wide and 30’ high and flying atop a 95’ flagpole, symbolic of the “land of the free and the home of the brave” – had made it through a 25-hour bombardment. The flag wouldn’t fare as well with souvenir hunters whose cutting of pieces whittled the flag down to 30’ by 34’.
I love that the flag was “super-sized.” I love that the people wanted pieces of it. I love how the underdog nation proved so bold in standing up to the well-established British Navy. And I also love how Key’s poem got matched up with a popular tune by John Stafford Smith. Smith had written the melody as a “pub tune” – or drinking song – for an organization of British professionals who fancied themselves amateur musicians. In joining the raucous and the revered, “The Star Spangled Banner” thus seems to capture the full spectrum of the brash young nation. Maybe that’s still going on as the national anthem is played before sporting events – a tradition that began during World War II.
But maybe your Memorial Day music tends towards “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” (Mark plays opening bars.) It was certainly one of the most popular patriotic songs of the 19th century and it has significant connections to Massachusetts. This song, written as we know it in 1832, has fewer references to war in it, although the Revolutionary War is fresh enough in the author’s mind at the time to make reference to “Land where my fathers died!” The lyrics turn more towards a celebration of freedom, linking it to the natural beauty of the country. “From every mountain side, Let freedom ring!” and “I love thy rocks and rills, Thy woods and templed hills.”
These lyrics were written by a different Smith - Samuel Francis Smith – as a favor to a friend. Smith, born in Newton, MA, was a young seminarian at Andover Theological Seminary. A friend who had obtained the tune from another friend who had been researching music in Germany, brought it to Smith asking for a translation of the German lyrics. Smith did the translation, but found himself so moved by the simple tune that within half an hour he had written new lyrics for it. These are the lyrics we sing today. The new song debuted at the Park Street Church in Boston, sung by a children’s choir of 500 voices.
Smith was stunned when the reaction to the song informed him that he had rewritten lyrics to the British anthem, “God Save the King.” In a world pre-internet, pre-television, pre-radio he had had no idea. Not only was it mortifying to have written lyrics for music celebrated by a nation so recently an adversary, but also the young United States was anxiously trying to create its OWN culture and Smith couldn’t believe that he’d elevated a British tune.
Further research, however, revealed that the origin of the tune was more complicated. Smith had found it in a German hymnal. The New York Sun reported the tune had appeared very early in America, but has also been used in Prussia, Spain, Norway, and Finland. How fitting it seems to me that “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” uses a tune borrowed from many countries– what a celebration of all the different peoples who helped to found our nation.
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (Mark plays opening bars) dating from 1861 offers another possibility on this patriotic song hit parade, but Rev. Sprecher spoke about it in depth in his Mothers’ Day sermon and I refer you to the website to read that excellent sermon if you missed it. All I want to point out here are two things: (1) This song, too, brings together the extraordinary and the ordinary. Julia Ward Howe married her lyrics of Christian righteousness – “He (the Lord) is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword.” – to an old marching tune about John Brown. Some identify the John Brown as a hapless Union soldier; some claim he is the radical abolitionist. Whoever he was, the tune became a powerful hymn with Howe’s lyrics. (2) Like Francis Scott Key and Samuel Smith before her, Julia Ward Howe wrote her lyrics in a rush of inspired enthusiasm. Having been challenged to write better words for the song, she arose in the pre-dawn hours to write down the lyrics as if driven by a powerful force.
As time passed, such inspiration could still exist, but would be tempered by a need for more painstaking revision. “America the Beautiful” (Mark plays opening bars) dates from 1904. Katherine Bates, a Falmouth, MA native who taught high school English and then at Wellesley College, set off to teach summer school in Colorado in 1893 and was captivated by the beauties she saw in this country. Her route took her to Niagara Falls; to Chicago and the Columbian Exposition many of you read about in the Devil in the White City. That “white city” became her “alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears”; to Pike’s Peak. It was while standing on Pike’s Peak, seeing the beautiful plains and farmlands to the east and the majestic mountains to the west, that Bates whipped out her ever-present notebook and jotted down some phrases that came to mind to describe the beauties she saw. Her “amber waves of grain” and “purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain” did not come together into a full lyric until two years later when her poem was published in 1895.
Several musicians clamored to write music for her poem, but it was only when Clarence Barbour matched the poem to Samuel Ward’s hymn “Materna” that “America the Beautiful” was fully created – a process that took over ten years. I can’t help but point out that, of all the songs noted thus far, this is the first to express some humility with the lyrics, “God mend thine very flaw. Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law!”
Well, so far we have a drinking song, a marching song, and two hymns that became wedded to lyrics that turned them into patriotic songs. “God Bless America” (Mark plays opening bars) offers us a show tune that evolved into a ballad. Irving Berlin, Russian immigrant and prolific songwriter, was serving in the United States Army at the end of World War I when he decided to write a Broadway show about the lighter side of Army life. The show, Yip! Yip! Yaphank! was named after his camp on Long Island and originally ended with a flag waving number that he somehow just couldn’t get to work. He set it aside, and twenty years later the radio star Kate Smith asked him for a song she could sing to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Armistice Day, ending World War I. Berlin had been working. unsuccessfully, to write a song about peace. He was seeking both commercial success – he was a professional musician - and political success, for his recent trip to Europe had made him keenly aware of the conflict brewing that would erupt into World War II. But when he heard from Kate Smith, and thought about what he viewed as her “sentimental fan base” he dusted off his twenty-year old song from Yip! Yip! Yaphank! and revised it for her.
She made it a hit instantly.
Even still, Berlin kept revising the lyrics right up to the publication deadline, changing such lines as “From the green fields of Virginia to the gold fields of Nome” to “From the mountain, to the valleys, to the oceans, white with foam” and then replacing the “valleys” with the “prairies.”
(As a side note, the song “This Land is Your Land” was first conceived as a parody of “God Bless America”. Woody Guthrie could not stand the flag waving of Berlin’s song and Kate Smith’s delivery. His patriotism was grounded in the people.)
Thus far I have given you a great deal of information about songs that you might identify as your Memorial Day Music. I’ve tried to give you a little sense of the songs’ origins and lyrics. Perhaps you would identify one of them as your Memorial Day music. Perhaps you have other songs you would claim. I know I have barely scratched the surface of possibilities, and I hope we might discuss our opinions further at coffee hour. But I haven’t yet told you what my Memorial Day music is. And that will be the last part of my remarks this morning. I love all the songs mentioned thus far, but to answer the question I can’t help but think about where I started – pointing out that we all bring different experiences and decades to our choices. With that in mind, the patriotic song that best represents my Memorial Day music isn’t really a song at all; it’s a bugle call that we all know as “Taps.” (Mark plays opening bars. )
Now, there are many reasons why I choose this song – reasons from both the head and the heart. One of the intellectual reasons is that “Taps” dates from the American Civil War – the very war that inspired the creation of Memorial Day. In armies of that time period, without field phones or radios, orders were conveyed to the troops via bugle calls. Elizabeth Custer, wife of General Custer, noted that the bugle, “ … was a familiar friend…It told us when to eat, to sleep, to march, and to go to church.” There was even a “Stable Call” that told horses to return to camp; and many horses understood the call. Not just a presence in regular camp life, bugles were an especially useful way to communicate in the confusion of battle.
General Butterfield wanted to adapt the bugle call for “Extinguish Lights” – a call that marked the end of the day. He explained to his bugler, Oliver Norton, what he wanted and, although Butterfield did not read or write music, together the two of them worked out the three-note call that we know today as “Taps.” Norton played it; other buglers picked it up and the use of “Taps” spread.
It was actually in Gen. Butterfield’s army that “Taps” was first played for a funeral, too. After a day of fighting at Harrison’s Landing, one of his soldiers was being buried after having been killed in action. The burial was so close to the Confederate Army lines and the officers did not want to initiate more fighting, that instead of the traditional three-rifle volley at the burial, “Taps” was played. That’s a tradition that continues to this day, repeated over and over at Arlington National Cemetery and elsewhere. It was also repeated as the bugle tune spread into the Confederate Army and was played at Stonewall Jackson’s funeral. I appreciate how the two warring sides became united in music.
Yet another intellectual reason for choosing this music comes from the origin of its title. “Taps” is a corruption of “Tattoo” which is a corruption of the Dutch “Tap Toe.” Dutch buglers would play “Tap Toe” to tell barkeepers to turn their taps “to”, or off, so the soldiers would stop carousing and return to camp for the night. Somehow I like the idea of “Taps” - which I find so mournful and moving - also carrying this connection to the life and spirit of soldiers.
The last intellectual reason that “Taps” moves me is also the first emotional reason. Although the tune does have lyrics (and I have copies of those lyrics for anyone interested to pick up on your way to Cushing Hall), it is most often heard without words. I appreciate the space that the universality of music by itself provides, allowing people of differing positions and experience to reflecting in a very personal fashion. There are no words to get in the way, as sometimes happens with lyrics from different ages that express feelings that may have evolved. Everyone is embraced in the basic, human call of those three notes.
And I guess that finally leads me to my own emotional perspective– the experiences my heart brings forward, the emotions I feel when I hear “Taps.” Some of that perspective involves my brother’s service in the Army overseas and my husband’s service for 38 years in the Army National Guard. Some of my perspective comes from how important the history of this country has always been in my life. You know that my five-greats grandfather was the first minister at this church. You may not know that his son – referred to in our family as the “Surgeon Daniel Shute” served in the Revolutionary War and was present in Yorktown when the British surrendered. That story has always been front and center in my family.
Being of the generation that I am, I also have keenly felt the contributions of my parents’ generation – now described as the Greatest Generation. Growing up it seemed that World War II had touched all my friends’ parents. My father and my uncles-in-law had all served. My mother and her friends had all coped with the challenges of loved ones fighting overseas. My Uncle Barney, my father’s brother, was killed at the Battle of the Bulge. He was twenty years old. Of course, I never met him. But growing up I felt as if I knew him from the stories that my grandparents, parents, and aunts would share. Every time I visited my grandparents’ house, I was keenly aware of the formal photo of Uncle Barney in its formal frame. The formality seemed so at odds with the warm, funny stories I would hear – perhaps it was somehow protecting the fragility of raw emotion. There was always an American flag by the photo and often freshly cut flowers. If I am moved to tears when hearing “Taps” it is in part informed by the powerful sense of loss surrounding all those memories of Barney.
Each of our answers to my original question, “What is Your Memorial Day Music?” will be influenced by both intellect and emotion, by understanding and experience. The answers will come from our heads and our hearts. We do not have to hold the same music, but it is important that we hold some music that expresses respect for the complexities of courage, vision, pride, service, commitment, and sacrifice that our military men and women have made every time they were asked to do so. It is important that we talk about – perhaps even sing, or at the very least play a recording of– that music with our friends, our families, and our children. Research into how our brains work reveals that music activates areas of the brain associated with empathy. In a country where not everyone will serve in the military, music becomes even more important in helping those of us who have not served understand what Memorial Day means. What an opportunity we have, in this multigenerational community, to understand more about the complexities of patriotism and the absolutes of sacrifice if we share our Memorial Day music.
I hope that whether it be at today’s coffee hour, or tomorrow’s town ceremony at 11:00 at Hingham Centre, or at 3:00 tomorrow, when the nation pauses for a moment of silence in honor of Memorial Day, there will be a suitable music in your minds and hearts as you consider all that people have sacrificed for this nation. This is what I will be hearing:
(Steve plays “Taps” from the vestibule.)