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‘Some are prayers, some are protests’: 76 musicians reimagine America the Beautiful
The iconic song has been given a diverse new set of versions thanks to pianist Min Kwon’s ambitious musical project
Despite what you may have heard, there is no definitive version of the song America the Beautiful.
Katharine Lee Bates wrote its lyrics as a poem in 1893, inspired by an ecstatic road trip from the Massachusetts house she shared with her longtime companion Katharine Coman to a teaching gig in Colorado. Over the next few decades, dozens of musicians set it to music, including New Jersey’s Samuel A Ward. His 1882 uniting of the text to a hymn he’d previously composed became, in time, a standard. In 1972, Ray Charles recorded the more or less definitive performance of it. But everyone from Pete Seeger to Tammy Faye Messner have tried their hand at Bates’s ode to equality between peoples and equanimity with nature. At Joe Biden’s inauguration, Jennifer Lopez belted it into a medley, while Carrie Underwood struggled through it at Donald Trump’s second one.
