oh beautiful for spacious skies for amber waves of grain

Willie Nelson, 9/11 Benefit Concert (2001) In 2021, the annual PBS Fourth of July concert special, A Capitol Fourth, featured performers Mickey Guyton, Jimmie Allen, and Jennifer Nettles, in addition to Alan Jackson, who performed his 2002 song “Drive,” a tribute to his late father Eugene Jackson and “America the Beautiful.”

Here are eight live versions of the patriotic classic interpreted by artists across several genres performed on the Fourth of July and other days of patriotism and celebration.Īlan Jackson, PBS Special ‘A Capitol Fourth’ (2021) Ward, who died in 1903, years before “America the Beautiful” reached the pinnacle of its fame as a national anthem, was also inspired by a trip on the Staten Island Ferry back to New York City and worked off the Hebrew hymn “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem.” Eventually, his music was combined with Bates’ poem, and the song was published in 1910 and re-titled “America the Beautiful.” Inspired by a train trip to teach in Colorado in 1983, Bates recounted all the sights she saw along the way in her poem-the view of the plain from Pikes Peak in the Colorado Rocky Mountains and the wheat fields he saw across Kansas. Originally written as a poem and called “Pikes Peak,” what would become “American the Beautiful” was published in the 1895 Fourth of July edition of the church periodical, The Congregationalist, and renamed “America.” Ward composed the anthem “America the Beautiful.” The song was written by Bates, an English professor at Wellesley College, while its music was composed by choir master and organist and choirmaster Ward from the Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey in 1895. Though the two never met, Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A.

Oh beautiful for spacious skies for amber waves of grain