Obama’s Musical Inauguration Sylvia L. Mayuga INQUIRER.net
January 26, 2009
“Four hours before the inauguration, there was enough menace in a subway crowd – a shouting throng packed together with exits jammed – that the station master made a bad choice of announcement. ‘Don’t panic,’ he bellowed over the public address system.
“In seconds, he recovered with a brilliant follow-up, a rhythmic, incanting ‘O-ba-ma!’ The crowd picked it up instantly, ‘O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!’ Patience and celebration were restored until the crush could ease. All the long day, it was like that. The new president’s name, simply his name, was just the restorative the enormous crowds needed.” The writer is Francis X. Klines, a member of the New York Times editorial board, recapturing that freezing January morning of new fire in Washington D.C.
Novelist Garrison Keillor segues: “It was like ‘The Apollo Goes to the Artic.’ There were Obama stocking caps, ski caps, skullcaps and pins with the first family on them, and everyone was beaming, and nobody complained about how cold it was or having to wait in line…everyone was in such a fine mood that waiting was painless, and the same was true of the line to go through security and get onto the Capitol grounds. The line was six blocks long, the longest line I have ever stood in, but there is nothing so pleasant as being in a crowd of happy people when you are happy about the same thing they’re happy about.”
It’s been five days, but pause a while longer to dwell in the inspired mood a newly minted President Barack Obama sent rippling through America and the rest of the world. Why, a Palestinian artist, Naif Al-Mutawa, even wanted to name his newborn fifth son ‘Barack’ before he reluctantly gave way to older relatives clamoring for a more familiar Arab name!
Most everyone but unreconstructed Republicans sees: we now have a real global leader in Washington D.C. He embodies our fondest hopes for peace, justice and well-being in mutual respect between tribes and nations, beyond color, creed, age and origin – humanity, in short.
This is columnist Juan Mercado’s point. It’s also Senator Pia Cayetano’s premise as she anticipates how good an Obama presidency could be for Filipinos here and abroad.
Her projection of a positive new environment for Filipino migrant labor is all of a piece with a silent explosion in the Web with the rise of Barack Obama.
It’s also the upbeat note in the macro perspective of this paper’s editorial the day after the inaugural which concludes: “we expect the US to wake up from the long civil-liberties nightmare inflicted by the cowboys in the White House and, in Obama’s words, to decisively ‘reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. (George) Washington summed up those ideals nicely as ‘hope and virtue’ — a republican value, universal in appeal.’”
Indeed, from inaugural day to this writing, wherever you turn in the media for more on that heady moment is the feel of a radiant new morning after a long dark night. It began as soon as Obama won the Nov.4 election celebrated in all tongues, by all social classes across the global social spectrum – the first salvo of the birth of a new era – not only in America but throughout the world. That was what we celebrated in the ritual of January 20, 2009.
From a long night of anger come tears of joy and a striking renewal of willingness in so many different kinds of people to work hard to realize the hope incarnated by Barack Obama. That alone makes this historical moment worth prolonging for the inner strength it stores for the long difficult days ahead.
And so, for what it’s worth, here’s the range of music that captured the making of new history, bound to past virtue in a new beginning at the Obama inaugural. It begins with Aretha Franklin’s passionate “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.”
The day before, the pre-inaugural concert We are One rock ‘n rolled in celebration as only Americans can at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial – “a day that combined inspiring political rhetoric with the very best of pop culture. Tens of thousands of citizens, a throng more than a mile long on the National Mall, braved frigid weather and long security lines to attend a historic concert celebrating the country's first black president - held at the feet of the monument honoring the country's great emancipator, Abraham Lincoln,” reports the Los Angeles Times.
It gives an interesting bit of history on that numinous spot of Washington DC: “Queen Latifah spoke about ‘the ongoing journey of America to be America.’ She noted that in 1939 the great black contralto Marian Anderson had been denied the opportunity to perform at Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, prompting then First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to arrange for Anderson to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.”
Read the whole report for both substance and flavor and don’t miss the video accompanying it. Here’s YouTube’s version of the concert highlights and here are two full numbers for the heck of it: America, the Beautiful sung by Beyoncé and a rousing This Land is Your Land, teaming up Bruce Springsteen with a grandson of the author of this American anthem, the late great Pete Seeger. Look at all that jumping and cheering! Contagious, don’t you think?
So contagious that the New York Times did a whole music review of the inaugural: “While it was a gospel and soul inauguration, it was also a hip-hop inauguration. Rappers who are charismatic, articulate, self-made successes may well see Mr. Obama as one of their own; he also gives them someone to boast about besides themselves.” Here’s the whole review, well worth your time.
Now we know more about the source of energy that had a new President hit the ground running on Day One.
UPDATE: Two readers, presumably American, wrote me as soon as they read this column.
This from Allan Wallach: "Pete Seeger is still very much alive at 89 and performed the song with his grandson and Bruce Springsteen. He's "great"--but judging from the performance very far from "late." Woody Guthrie, who died in 1967, wrote This Land is Your Land. Pete got the audience on the mall to sing the original, far more subversive version. Click the URL you embed in your text, which connects to the Youtube clip. It's one of the greatest moments in American musical-political history…Very best.”
My reply: Thank you, Allan Wallach. You're the second American reader to point this out. I now realize that what threw me was Bruce Springsteen's onstage intro on video, where I heard him say he was performing with “Pete Seeger's grandson” (the name began with a T but the rest was inaudible).
That's what made me presume that Pete Seeger was "late" as well as great. My impression was that the white-haired dude WAS the grandson. Was that Pete himself? If so, where was the grandson, and why did Bruce give him a special intro and not acknowledge that Pete himself was beside him? And why did he say that "the father of American folk music, Pete Seeger" wrote that song, not Woody Guthrie, whom the other reader, Susan McGee, said was its author?
She also pointed out that Seeger is very much alive at 89 and that he was there, too, although not onstage, as you say. The man who sang with Springsteen didn't look 89 to me. Was that really him? I'll be googling for his photo and posting your letter with an apology, if so. I tried clicking to the video again, but YouTube had dropped it (along with Beyonce's number) 12 hours later.
It's become a mystery to me. This must be acknowledged. Nothing should mar the memory of that moment in DC.
A Google search was rewarded by more musical history. First, Wikipedia confirmed that that was indeed Pete Seeger, spry at 89, onstage with Springsteen on Jan.20. Here’s the link.
As to This Land Is Your Land, turns out its origins gave its place in the Obama inaugural a special meaning. Click and read carefully.
As I said, YouTube already dropped that number. I for one need to wait until a whole CD of the concert is available to check whether Bruce Springsteen made a mistake or I misheard him. Such are the perils and rewards of reporting from Web reseach.
Look what else Alan shared from Pete Seeger’s younger sister Peggy, in a formidable American musical family tree dropping its fruits on Obama!
