The music plays a large part in the song’s mystique. The many memorable recordings and renditions - from Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Willie Nelson, Mariah Carey and others - all share a moving simplicity, without the vocal acrobatics that too often accompany “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In 1979, Pope John Paul II recited its fervent prayer - “America, America, God shed his grace on thee” - as he descended from his plane on his first trip to this country.
Voices quavered as crowds solemnly sang the song outside the White House in 1941 after Pearl Harbor and, six decades later, at Ground Zero after 9/11. “I can’t read the lines without swallowing hard,” one early reader wrote Bates. The song has always stirred deep emotion. More: It looks forward to a day when America’s “alabaster cities” finally will “gleam undimmed by human tears.” across the wilderness,” and pays tribute to the nation’s defenders in war, the brave “heroes. It hails the pioneering forebears who beat “a thoroughfare of freedom. It evokes the vitality of an ever-widening America, celebrates its storied past and - most important - evokes its limitless future potential.
#O beautiful for spacious skies chords full
The full hymn is more than just a poetic appreciation of the country’s wonders of nature.
In an instant, she said, “the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind.” Those lines became “America the Beautiful” - a song that will be featured Monday in countless parades and band concerts.Įveryone knows the first verse, with its evocation of “amber waves of grain” and “purple mountain majesties.” But how many have read - let alone sung - the entire song? He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them.Ĥ And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.Katharine Lee Bates, a 33-year-old English literature teacher at Wellesley College, was on “a merry expedition up Pike’s Peak” in Colorado in 1893 when she looked out “over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies.” “And Jesus said, For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see and that they which see might be made blind.” “Behold, ye despisers, and wonder, and perish: for I work a work in your days, a work which ye shall in no wise believe, though a man declare it unto you.”Ģ0 Seeing many things, but thou observest not opening the ears, but he heareth not.Ĩ Bring forth the blind people that have eyes, and the deaf that have ears. full) it amounts to the seventh part of the light of the sun.Īnd I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off: and he shall speak peace unto the heathen: and his dominion shall be from sea even to sea, and from the river even to the ends of the earth.
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