I’m surprised that Back Home Again in Indiana is their unofficial song. I guess I’ve heard Jim Nabors sing it too many times at the Indy 500 (2009 version) Plus if you don’t like it, it’s pretty short!
8^o
Not official but it’s usually sung “The people are happy” which is just kind of awkward. Using “gay” engenders much snickering which is detrimental to the solemnity of the moment. Apparently we are all eleven year-olds.
Maybe it’s just the politicians.
Maybe they thought that the darkies wouldn’t like to be called gay, so they made everybody gay to be fair?
Nitpick: Ray Charles didn’t write it, Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell did.
Yes, but Georgia goes the further step of having the official version be specifically the Ray Charles one.
ISTM the musically/lyrically good ones tend to be pieces that became popular on their own merits first, and *then *were adopted by the state. With exceptions both ways, of course.
I guess they had Rainer Wolfcastle sing it as a shout-out to Matt Groening.
You don’t know how good Indiana can be until you’ve heard it played by a jazz band.
North Carolina’s has to be in the running for the worst ever. It combines awkward, strange lyrics with a disjointed tune. Kids are taught how to sing it in 4th grade when they study state history (HOO-rah! HOO-rah! The Old North State for - eeeh- eeeh- VER!), but then you blessedly rarely hear it again. This is just the first of several equally bad verses:
A decade or so back, there was some pitch to replace it with something catchier, but the option that was put out was a really cornball thing written by an ad agency. Here’s a really bad cover version of it. The original advertisement version was at least better performed. I was relieved that it was not accepted as the state song, but disappointed that they didn’t give the death penalty to the lyricist that decided that “Lord it’s just like living in a POME / I like calling North Carolina home” was a perfectly good rhyme.
Beat that, you witlings!
Nevermind - I misread the OP.
Peter and Lou Berryman had it right:
“Oh (your state’s name here)! Oh (again)! What a state!
I have not been back since (a reasonable date)”
“I’d like to wake up where the (state songbird) sings,
Where they manufacture (the names of some things)…”
Etc.
I lived in North Carolina for about 11 years, and I don’t recall EVER hearing the state song - and luckily, I moved there in High School, so I never had to learn it. 