ON THE RECORD

A lively survey of quintessentially American songs.

It’s typically American, Johns Hopkins musicologist Celenza notes, that rebelling colonials adopted the derisive British song “Yankee Doodle” as a badge of pride. But a true anthem was wanted, and it came in the War of 1812 (which “we tend to forget…began as an act of US aggression”): the “Star-Spangled Banner,” written by a lawyer (and slaveholder in the “land of the free”) who borrowed the barely singable tune from a British men’s club. It might have been a handier ditty, such as “My Country ’Tis of Thee” (its tune borrowed from “God Save the King”) or “Hail, Columbia,” but alas, no. Not long after emancipation, the formerly enslaved and their descendants found an anthem of their own in “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” with its resonant cadences (“Lift every voice and sing / Till earth and heaven ring, / Ring with the harmonies of Liberty…”), a song that deserves wider circulation outside the African American church community. Other songs in Celenza’s roster speak to other aspirations of freedom: George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which “captured the mechanistic beat of modern life”; the collected works of Duke Ellington, blending jazz with the European classical tradition; Abel Meeropol’s antilynching ballad “Strange Fruit” as sung by the great Billie Holiday, who ended her set with it and left the stage immediately after, leaving her audiences stunned by the force of her delivery; Jerome Robbins’ musical West Side Story, originally meant to tell the story of immigrant Eastern European Jews in New York and seized upon by politicians to denounce juvenile delinquency; and of course that great delinquent Bob Dylan, whose folk anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Celenza wryly notes, offers “an answer that is equally evasive and profound,” like the author himself. Celenza’s selections, extending into the era of Hamilton, aren’t unexpected, but she has something fresh to say about all of them.

A treasure for students of the true American songbook.