In 2021, the annual PBS Fourth of July concert special, A Capitol Fourth, featured performers Mickey Guyton, Jimmie Allen, and Jennifer Nettles, in addition to Alan Jackson, who performed his 2002 song “Drive,” a tribute to his late father Eugene Jackson and “America the Beautiful. Here are eight live versions of the patriotic classic interpreted by artists across several genres performed on the Fourth of July and other days of patriotism and celebration.Īlan Jackson, PBS Special ‘A Capitol Fourth’ (2021) While Bates was initially surprised by the poem’s success, she later reflected that its enduring "hold as it has upon our people, is clearly due to the fact that Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood.Ward, who died in 1903, years before “America the Beautiful” reached the pinnacle of its fame as a national anthem, was also inspired by a trip on the Staten Island Ferry back to New York City and worked off the Hebrew hymn “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem.” Eventually, his music was combined with Bates’ poem, and the song was published in 1910 and re-titled “America the Beautiful.” O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain America America God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea. in manuals of hymns and prayers, and anthologies of patriotic prose and poetry. in a large number of regularly published song books, poetry readers, civic readers, patriotic readers. Within twenty years, Bates (after revising some of the lyrics in 1904) had "given hundreds, perhaps thousands, of free permissions" for "America the Beautiful" to appear "in church hymnals and Sunday School song books of nearly all the denominations. Celebrating "country loved" and the "patriot dream," the song resonated with Americans from all walks of life and became enormously popular. Located at the Garden of the Gods Visitors Center. Marker can be reached from the intersection of North 30th Street and Gateway Road. Ward’s "Materna," the tune to which we sing it today. Marker is in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in El Paso County. Bates’s patriotic words were soon set to music, most popularly to composer S. The poem was first printed in a weekly newspaper, The Congregationalist, on July 4, 1895. under those ample skies," and "the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind." Those opening lines-"O beautiful for spacious skies, / For amber waves of grain, / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain!"-would eventually become the lyrics of one of the best-known songs in American history.īates finished writing "America the Beautiful" before leaving Colorado Springs but didn’t think of publishing it until two years later. Oh, beautiful for pilgrim feet, Whose stern, impassioned stress. Above the fruited plain America America God shed his grace on thee, And crown thy good with brotherhood. O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears America America God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law. Oh, beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties. At the top, Bates later wrote, she was inspired by "the sea-like expanse of fertile country. America America May God thy gold refine, till all success be nobleness, and every gain divine. Bates and the other professors decided to "celebrate the close of the session by a merry expedition to the top of Pike’s Peak." They made the ascent by prairie wagon. Bates was a professor at Wellesley and had traveled west to teach a summer course in Colorado Springs. 1925, poet Katharine Lee Bates described her inspiration for writing "America the Beautiful," the poem that would evolve into one of the nation’s best-loved patriotic songs, during a trip to Pike’s Peak in 1893.
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