"Home on the Range"

 

Pure speculation on my part, but what I’m betting at this very moment is that all you have to do is repeat the three-word title I’m using today and whether or not you’re a musicians, those words unwind themselves in your imagination musically—I’m saying you sang the words even as  you read them, and  you did so because of such unshakeable familiarity that it’s just plain impossible for most adult Americans not to burst into song.

What song? An old hymn to the glories of the west, to the beauty and grace of our home out here in fly-over country.

“Oh, give me a home

Where the buffalo roam,

Where the deer and antelope play…”

You know the words darn well.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our only four-term President (‘33, height of the Depression to ‘45, end of Second World War) loved America’s hymn, even though Siouxlanders of his time would have called him a city slicker. It’s tough to imagine FDR sitting in front of a roaring fire in his office and, accompanied by staff, suddenly breaking into song. But it happened and more than once, a sing-along in the Oval Office, the whole gang, including Mr. President, in the lead.

With that kind of billing, “O Give Me a Home,” in 1934 sat comfortably  atop the nation’s top-40, numero uno. Among whom? Most all of America. Your particular origins were of no consequence; no matter how far you roamed from the shadow of Statue of Liberty, you sang it. As ordinary as Iowa mud—well, moreso.

Richard Byrd, the renowned explorer, claimed he sang “Home on the Range” more frequently than he would have liked to during his lonely six-month sojourn at the North Pole, especially when his phonograph froze up, forcing him to solo with nary the help of a harmonica. Penguins don’t like us reading their old reviews, but rumor has it they weren’t all that grand. The whole world knew that the homesickness for the plains that’s at the heart of a tune the whole world sings.

Where seldom is heard

A discouraging word

And the skies are not cloudy all day.

You know. I know. We all know.

______________________

A little more tomorrow.