These days, Comcast’s “Sounds of the Season” music channel is belting out the songs one would expect to hear at a July 4th fireworks show. Lots of Sousa/Williams instrumental marches, but in between lots of other songs with lyrics: “when Johnny comes marching home,” “proud to be an American,” “Arlington,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, and so on. The marches are fun, but the other songs are just…cringy to me. Propaganda-like, made for indoctrination. Reminds me of church hymns, which made me comparably uncomfortable when I was a kid.
Sousa is good. Williams is good. Anything even remotely country-ish is banned from my planet. If the piece is anything someone wearing a cowboy, trucker or baseball hat/cap anywhere in the Solar system could possibly be singing, humming, kazoo-ing or hand-jiving, it is to be purged.
As said, the Sousa marches are fun, particularly when played by a good marching band. But some of the songs, particularly God Bless the U.S.A. (aka Proud to Be an American), are really awful. The older ones, like Battle Hymn of the Republic and When Johnny Comes Marching Home are OK but kind of dated.
When I was young they were kind of fun to bang out on a piano (some hymns too, regardless of the words). Most of Sousa is great (Liberty Bell will remind you of a certain British show). I played French horn which always got the worst part - off beat quarter notes. We usually just transposed the trumpet part so it was more fun to play.
Our college band did visits to high schools across the state, inviting the HS band director to direct Stars & Stripes Forever. When it got to the piccolo part in the end, they got a surprise when the tuba section stood up and played that part instead.
My dad turns 94 on the 4th. He’s a graduate of the Naval Academy and when I was a kid, he used to play Sousa marches on the 4th. We particularly enjoyed the Washington Post, and I attach a particularly crisp version, which explains why it was composed and how it got its name.
It’s been many years since we’ve listened to this, and so I think I’ll surprise him with a Sousa concert on Saturday. Thanks OP for the inspiration!
I don’t really care for them, but (unlike Christmas music) they’re pretty easy to ignore. I rarely hear patriotic songs and don’t notice an uptick around July 4th. I don’t think I could endure a music channel going heavy on that crap. To each his/her own, however.
From the dusty closet space in the back of my head, memories of this awful patriotic song we had to learn when I was a 4th grader —
There’s a new flag flying o’er America
A new flag proudly waves
A new flag flying o’er America
The land of the free and the brave
Old Glory now boasts fifty starts
In a field of blue
Alaska and Hawaii
We welcome both of you
There’s a new flag flying o’er America
A new flag flies today
Alaska and Hawaii
Welcome to the USA!
NOTE: I was in fourth grade in freaking 1969. I suspect the teacher had been methodically teaching this song to 4th graders year after year for ten years and, if still teaching elementary school now at the estimated age of 105, would still be teaching it to them now.
I guess all the radio stations around here have the same album of patriotic songs and trot it out on July 4, because I always hear the same songs. One of them is 76 Trombones. You know, from The Music Man. Because nothing inspires patriotism more than a Broadway show tune!
