The great tangled rope of popular music (American and otherwise) includes so many disparate strands that to speak of it as a single “thing” invites ridicule: show tunes and jazz, bluegrass and ragtime, country, folk, rock, metal, rap, and hip-hop… And then what about “easy listening”? and popular classical music, like Gershwin’s and Copland’s? New Age? Heck, what about Christmas music?
So in declaring (as I did) that this What’s in a Song series would explore “American popular songs with long histories,” well, I might as well have announced upfront that anything listenable was fair game.
Under the circumstances, inevitably, I’d find myself bumping into the category known loosely as “sacred music” — at least, those bits of it which have percolated out into pop culture. Off the top of my head, only two songs in this category appealed to me as subjects. The first, “Amazing Grace” — okay, that’s been tackled by an impressive roster of pop artists. But I have one problem with celebrating “Amazing Grace,” beautiful though it is: few performers seem able to resist milking its very “sacredness.” What emerges from the throats of such performers isn’t a song about grace, even about the special grace of music: it’s a song about the singer.
But almost by definition, the other song has resisted manipulation at the hands of the lugubriously self-righteous. That song is the subject of this two-part post.
