Finding Joy During Hard Times

This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from NPR and through Line I'm Randab de Fasta Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the US that began two hundred and fifty years ago. Throughout this series, we brought you stories from all corners of American life, since the founders stated their intentions for this nation We've talked about the creation of the voting system in the US We've shared firsthand experiences of the Great Depression And we've looked at the American economy. Today we're doing something a little different We're gonna listen to some music to help us explore the past, of course You can look at any point in American history and understand what was happening through the sounds that were developing at that time I could borrow a phrase from Quest Love, which is music is history. You know, ' it is world and in my experience it is that is reallyally how I how I understand the scope of time This is scholar and classical pianist, Laara Downes She's been working on her own AP two hundred fifty series with NPR, looking at the last two hundred and fifty years through music I realized that Classical musicians Start our training very young. I mean was by the time I was four years old, I was already a musician. That understanding of the world by playing music that's two and three hundred years old. For for me two hundred and fifty years, I'm like, yeah, that's where I live all the time. When you think about it, there really is no better through line to history than music. How songs, the very music notes, are passed down sampled and recycled, and sometimes turned into something completely new Not only do they get passed down, but they get passed around They move among different sectors and with the constant flow into this country too, there's just been this Never stopping evolution Today on the show, we're gonna to hear some of Lara's series Three stories featuring writers, musicians and scholars, about three songs that have defined America Amazing grace. My days have been so wondrous free and get happy What I always say about these songs is that like my great grandmother knew this song and your great grandmother knew this song and they might have lived totally different lives in very different places and that song like connected them across time and place And I think that that is the superpower of music is that these songs they illustrate that Our journeys have been shared And I Troubles have been shared you know, that we've we have worked together. in many ways to bring this country present day. That's coming up after a quick break Laura Downes has been traveling around the country talking to scholars, historians, and musicians with music as her guide The first piece we're going to hear from Lara is an interview with author Imman Perry. The song Amazing Grace. Gace sw the song. John Newton, an English clergyman, poet, slave triter and eventual abolitionist He writes this song in the early seventeen seventies. Yes And it's kind of never gone away. It's remarkably resilient A! There are I think over three thousand recordings of this song in the Library of Congress. And I think every time I hear it, I do ask myself, what is this thing called grace? Grace is that unearned gift, right? something divine within that you are born with. And there's sort of a story that the lyrics are a direct response to Newton's experience of being horrified while working aboard a slave ship. So I think we can read in the song this sense of enncountering the lowest point of devastation and still having a sense of the divine and possibility. and maybe why the song has a particular power in the U. S. context. This place that's made of dreams and also their deferrals P bl But n Pus Gace as forgiveness and redemption, but also this second chances thing We don't often think about the fact that the first several generations of enslaved people in this country hadn't necessarily Christianity And so it makes sense that then in the early nineteenth century this song would begin to move into the Back community as Christianity did. It really emphasized the vision of freedom. And so the song Just being a song that comes from the heart and mind of someone who's becoming an abolitionist, it becomes a song that can speak to the descendants of those who are in the hold of the ship. For me, I'm not a religious person. I define faith as belief in my fellow humans.. And this song speaks so clearly to that It's open to interpretation. It is. It really is. And I think that's part of what's so wonderful about all of the varying musical interpretations of it. Tuse grace T. S here ace My fears really This project started as a reflection on this two hundred fifteth anniversary of the country so quickly, I understood that this was not nearly as much about the past as it is about the future.ight ye. And that history is built on the future. Yes, because everybody who's ever been a first generation American, that is what they believed in My favorite version is Aretha Franklin's nineteen seventy two. and without question that moment was about the future, even though she was drawing on tradition in order to sort of propel her voice into what was coming Ready. Well W He. And I think Amazing Grace is really one of the clearest examples of this song that means so many different things to so many people, gets passed around, doesn't stay property of anybody. The way that this particular song is available T Americans is a tradition? Yes. I think there's something really meaningful about trying to find the kind of resonance with each person who's sitting across from you. And that does not mean agreement necessarily on anything, but there is value in trying to figure it out. and in order to do that You actually have to leave open possibility. Yes, always As part of her series, Laura also hosted some live events across the country Next up. We're going hear her conversation from one of those events with historian Jill Lapore. this song on a snowy night in a two hundred year old barn in Brattleborough, in front of a capacity audience It's a new arrangement of My days have been So wondrous Free. Francis Hopkinson wrote the original in seventeen fifty nine in Philadelphia I've been so wonderful ree It's often called the first American song, because it might just be the first documented formally notated song written on American soil Although there were songs long before that by indigenous peoples, and the music Africans brought here in bondage, songs that dreamed of freedom I came to this old barn to talk with historian Jill Lapore. She's written a nine hundred page history of the United States, and she told us that even before the Revolution, America was already a melting pot. eighteenth century Atlantic seaboard culture was a crazy mix probably about the most sort of ethnically racially linguistically pluralist that the country has ever been Philadelphia was the biggest city. very English in many ways, but also quite Dutch and a lot of Irish and very German. And then the enslaved population was highable, but so was the free black population because by seventeen fifty nine when Hopkinson was writing, already Quakers had condemned and denounced slavery. So a really wonderfully Vibrant culture the music really starts to Mingle right away People brought what they had when they came here. We all carry songs with us and Africans brought their songs with them The seeds of traditional black spirituals like noobody knows the trouble I've seen I just hearing this music and thinking about how much it was suppressed To think of the music as surviving is just an incredible testament to the vitality and insistence of the human spirit's need for beauty But I think there's another legacy of that era of great brutality that we also tend to forget, and that is it's not an accident that the world's first modern democracy is born in a part of the world that is one of the last places where human bondage exists. In fact, it is the cries for freedom. The insistence that enslaved Africans make and the insistence on sovereignty that indndigenous peoples make. And out of that emerges this discourse of rights You know, that gets us all the way down to the Bill of Rights and the awareness of inexcusability of tyranny over other people That's where the American idea is born in that crucible of violence. Is this encouraging or is it just I really struggle with this. It's so hard for us to wrap our heads around this moment, to think about this founding promise. We certainly haven't achieved it Is the idea, just that we're still in the thick of it two hundred and fifty years in the road is still bumpy The only way is forward Jill Laport says, we definitely wouldn't want to go back. There's nothing romantic to me about the eighteenth century. You would die in childbirth, your children would die infancy. you would live to twenty four. No. What is really extraordinary is The capacity for the creation of beautiful work and the devising of ingenious ideas in spite of The incredible cruelty and suffering of daily living. And today, in this anniversary year The American melting pot of art and ideas is still resilient. At the end, Jill Leapur left us with a lesson from those hard times when America was young the generosity of spirit around what it is to lift one another up is an ideal of the revolution that we very often forget and we need in this moment. So we all bundled up and headed out into the snowy night With new insights about our history, and some ideas about how to build our future together The last piece we're going to play of Laras is about the song Get Happy It was written during a particularly painful period in our country's history And that's a theme Lara found in her reporting for this series The idea of smiling through the pain being a part of the DNA of American songs I've become so aware of this role that American music has always taken of injecting that joy and that optimism. And once you start to look at that, you realize how all of the happiest songs honestly come from the hardest times Here's Laura's conversation with the writer, John McHorter The linguist and columnist for the New York Times Harold Arlland wrote the song Get Hay, sometime in the fall of nineteen twenty nine within weeks of the October stock market crash that launched the Great Depression By the next year the song was in the top ten on the pop charts G get to troules and just get happy You better take all your has away Canad doa, come on, get happy It's such a hummable optimistic tune in such a disastrous time And I'm imagining the comfort and energy that came with that song playing over the radio into America's kitchens and living rooms. The song became a hit when the whole country had just fallen to pieces. Mickey Mouse is dancing around and there are these songs that go But it really was kind of a therapy. The phrase get happy comes from the Back gospel music tradition. It's a reference receiving the Holy Spirit with that, you know ecstatic singing that happens in a gospel church service When I think about Harold Arlen choosing that title for the song, it really makes me think about the origins of so much of our American music, which comes from those Negro spirituals and work songs that were an outlet for expression and to imagine a better life. Yeah, it's interesting with Arlen He was somebody who Ethel Waters called the blackest white man I ever knew. And so he had this feel And it was Ted Kohler, his lyricist who actually came up with this get happappy, I'm sure with the encouragement of Arlland because he would have probably known the phrase get happy. And I mean, the whole lyric of that song it's really specifically about, you know, get ready for the judgment D. It's kind of impersonating. Kind of a spiritual. They were really channeling something real so that get happappy feels like such a black song that I don't think any black person would feel inauthentic singing it. That's one that just joins America together. For getra troubles and just get happy. You betteretter chase all your cs away. Sing Hallelujah, come on, get happy, Get ready for the jaxman D I hate to bring Arlen into this, but they had this huge poppit and probably, you know, both of them bought houses on the basis of it. Whereas there were all of these black composers who could have written the same sort of thing. That just has to be said. Speaking of time and place, in these hard times, there are choices that you have to make about the role that you take as, you know, a dancing mouse, the role that you take in our society. Do you want to chronicle the hardship and sort of interpret this moment and you do. Or do you accept the job of being an entertainer? And do you kind of try to move past your own feelings and try to make that thing that makes other people feel better? What do you think? I'm asking you as a professional musician. Well, I mean, I think I wiggle around with it. think I mean, honestly, I think it depends on the day I'm thinking about one artist who's absolutely chosen to be a spokesperson for Joy, and I think that his whole heart and soul is in it. and that's John Bapatiste And you know, since he was a kid busking on the subways, his message is really come together, experience joy collectively and the music is part of that. He had a song in twenty twenty one called We are. And what he's doing with that song is he's evoking the ancestors and their persistent faith in the power of joy. But it's also a song to rally us you know our own times of trouble. The kind of joy that he perveys, there's a little part of me that always thinks of it as a bit of a pose and I'm wrong Sometimes I'm a little bit afraid of those calls for joy, mayaybe because I am a slightly depressive person, maybe because I think too much. I think that when things are really dark, joy isn't easy. Part of being American is that focus on the great day coming, the idea that we are an experiment that's always going on. It's human to try to make the best of the worst That's how our hormones work in our brains. We as Americans We center joy It's in our founding promise, the pursuit of happiness That's it for this week's America in Pursuit. Join us next week when we hear stories of protests in America with NPR's ongoing AP two hundred fifty series Police came and they shouted and they got in people's face and no one budged That's next wee. and stick around after the credits for something a little special. A short story about how one tiny accident created a new Big sound This episode was produced by Keana Moradam with help from Amy Padulla and edited by Leanna Simstrom with support from the through line production team. Music by Ramin Ada Louie and his band Drop Electric. Special thanks to Julia Redpath, Irene Naguchci, Yolanda Sangwuani, Casey Minor, and Lindseay McKenna. I'm Randabd Feta Before we go Here's NPR's Jennifer Luddon with one final story about an important moment in American music history. In a glass case at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History sits Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet Notable for so many reasons, not least of which is its angled bell, which was kind of the trademark We'll get back to why the bell points up Music curator Crystal Klingenberg says the man and his instrument were an American original. And it's one of many examples of where American entertainment has just Burst forth with something new and special and reach the whole world In the nineteen forties, Gillespie, with his signature puffed out cheeks, helped forge a new jazz era edgier, faster, complex rhythms called bebops. The State Department enlisted Gillesbie and others as Cold War jazz ambassadors to win hearts and minds abroad evenven as they faced racism at home In nineteen fifty five, after Gillespie and Ella Fitzgerald played to an integrated audience in Houston, they were arrested on trrumped up charges of gambling Klingenberg says the photos of them in jail are incredible Dizzy's kind of hanging out being dizzy. You see Ella Fitzgerald in the most beautiful elegant gown. likeike she's not meant to be there in the lockup. Why is she there Despite such pressures on stage, Gillespie was charming Plful Funny That sense of fun came through when in nineteen fifty three, his trumpet first got bent. Accidents happened on stage. and it fell. He picked it up to play and decided he liked the strange news sound So he had his trumpets custom made that way As testament to his nearly six decade career, Klingenberg first saw Gillespie as a child watching Sesame Street. He was that warm kind of jazz grandpa A circle of kids bop and sway, entranced by the grreay haired man with a funny looking trumpet. Jennifer Ludon, N PR News