HOLIDAYS

“America the Beautiful” started out as a poem. In 1893, Katherine Lee Bates, a professor at Wellsley College in Massachusetts was traveling by train to Colorado Springs, Colorado to teach at Colorado College. The train traveled through Chicago when it hosted the World’s Columbian Epxosition, then on to the wheat fields of Kansas, then to the top of “Pike’s Peak” where she had a majestic view of the Great Plains. It was at the top of that mountain that the words of the poem came to her. She titled the poem “Pike’s Peak.”
The poem was published in 1895 and by 1900 75 different melodies had been written. According to Wikipedia “a hymn tune composed in 1882 by Samuel A. Ward, the organist and choir director at Grace Church, Newark, was generally considered the best music as early as 1910 and is still the popular tune today.”

The lyricist and composer never met.

The orchestration we have was created for the Bell Telephone Hour.

Music and Lyrics by George M. Cohan, written for his 1906 Broadway musical “George Washington, Jr.” According to Wikipedia,b”You’re a Grand Old Flag” quickly became the first song from a musical to sell over a million copies of sheet music.

The original lyric for this perennial favorite came, as Cohan later explained, from an encounter he had with a Civil War veteran who fought at Gettysburg. The two men found themselves next to each other and Cohan noticed the vet held a carefully folded but ragged old flag. The man reportedly then turned to Cohan and said, “She’s a grand old rag.” Cohan thought it was a great line and originally named his tune “You’re a Grand Old Rag.” So many groups and individuals objected to calling the flag a “rag,” however, that he “gave ’em what they wanted” and switched words, renaming the song “You’re a Grand Old Flag”‘

The orchestration we have for rental was created for the Bell Telephone Hour.