Ahead of Memorial Day weekend and the country's 250th birthday this summer, one patriotic song keeps showing up at big American events: Ray Charles' 1972 version of "America the Beautiful." Charles took a melody and a poem two American strangers had stitched together six decades earlier and made it the country's unofficial national anthem.
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Katharine Lee Bates, an English professor at Wellesley College, wrote the lyrics as a poem in 1893 after a train trip to Colorado Springs. The view from atop Pikes Peak gave her the line "purple mountain majesties." She published it on July 4, 1895, in a church paper called The Congregationalist.
The melody was older. Church organist Samuel A. Ward had written it in 1882 on a ferry ride home from Coney Island, originally to pair with the hymn "O Mother Dear, Jerusalem." Ward and Bates never met. An editor combined their work in 1910, more than seven years after Ward died.
How Ray Charles Made It the Definitive Version
Charles cut his recording for his 1972 album A Message from the People, produced by Quincy Jones. The album was a protest record at its core. Charles opens the track with the third verse, the one about "heroes proved in liberating strife," then returns to the first.
The single barely registered commercially, peaking at No. 98 on the R&B chart in 1976. But it became the version. The Recording Academy inducted Charles' recording into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2005. He sang it at the 1984 Republican National Convention and at Super Bowl XXXV in 2001, and his recording aired on New Year's Eve in Times Square for years afterward.
Bates died in 1929 thinking the song belonged to America. She wasn't wrong.
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