Songs of America

Meacham, Jon and Tim McGraw. Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music that Made a Nation. Random House, 2019.

This is a fantastic book by two highly accomplished contemporaries.  Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer with plenty of life accomplishments, and the guy is barely 50 years old!  Tim McGraw is a Grammy Award-winning entertainer, author, and actor, having sold more than 50 million records, among an insane number of other accomplishments.  Absolutely you must check out his “Humble and Kind” which is the kind of thing we sorely need much more of all over the world.  <   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awzNHuGqoMc   >

Splendidly adorned by well-chosen photographs throughout, the text deals with “the American story, with special reference to music that shaped those years, from the period before the Revolutionary War through the attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2001” (A Note to the Reader).  Meacham wrote the text while McGraw “offers his take on selected songs in a series of sidebars” (A Note to the Reader). These two guys have a heart (“A true patriot salutes the flag but always makes sure it’s flying over a nation that’s not only free but fair, not only strong but just” (4). And intense understanding for the idea and ideals that formed the country.  No one is left out.  This is inclusive writing at its finest.  The best thing is that the tunes appear in the background of the mind as the text and sidebars are absorbed.  And absorbing the entire book is.

Extensive notes for each chapter and a bibliography that covers a huge amount of investigative musicological research for this topic, the book does not disappoint on any level.  It is a must-get resource for researching why and how music is used in war not only because of specific music applying to the topic of war and music, but for the psychological effects of patriotic music on the psyche, specifically the psyche of Americans and extrapolated to the psyche of anyone who loves their country the world over.