Codger’s Column: A common chorus

Just before the excess air was ferried out of the summer season, Codger attended one of the most encouraging events of the year so far, a grassroots, nonpartisan celebration of the power of song to bring people to a common moment on common ground. He actually felt a tingle of optimism, saw a sparkle in the darkness.

Two old friends, part-time residents who have been sharing their fanboy passion for pop music with their Shelter Island neighbors for some seven years now, presented their finest jamboree — a community referendum to celebrate the quintessential American song.

Welcome back David Browne, the renowned author and Rolling Stone music writer, and the equally celebrated Tom Junod, the title of whose current blockbuster memoir, “In the Days of My Youth I was Told What It Means to be a Man,” was appropriately plucked from a Led Zeppelin lyric. The event was the latest in their attempts to convince even the Island’s devotees of the Perlman Program and the Friends of Music that classical isn’t the only sound.

According to David, “We normally spend much of our time together gabbing about, and dissecting, beloved records, overrated musicians and how in the world certain songs were hugely popular … So our public discussions have been a natural extension of what we do anyway.”

With the help of Library Director Terry Lucas, they ran an e-mail primary and then the election, presented at St. Mary’s Church, in the form of a March Madness bracket combining the popular vote and their own picks.  

The resulting sweet sixteen songs, which were offered up for a final selection, ran an interesting spectrum from “American Pie,” Don McLean’s conflation of the history of the country with the history of rock and roll, to Lee Greenwood’s sappy “God Bless the USA,” which departed early.

Most of the contending songs touched some point of understandable pride ranging from Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors,” about a poor girl’s appreciation for her hand-made clothes, which in raised-hand voting eliminated the panoramic train trip of “The City of New Orleans.” The soaring early favorite, “This Land is Your Land,” ousted Bruce Springsteen’s roaring “Born in the USA.” Whitney Houston’s breathtaking “Star Spangled Banner,” was beaten by Ray Charles’ soulful “America the Beautiful,” the eventual winner. 

The audience, about 75 people of mostly middle and older age, slipped quickly from enthusiastic attention to singalong mode. After all, this was their music. Even Codger, never a pop music aficionado, found himself quickly engaged, surprised at how easily he found symbolic representations of different aspects of America in songs he had listened to casually, if at all. 

This suddenly wasn’t audio wallpaper. He wondered just what the urban sophisticate Cole Porter had in mind when he wrote “Don’t Fence Me In,” with its call for total freedom or at least lots of land. Was he reflecting manifest destiny, open range disputes, the selling of the national parks, the Soloviev Group?

One song that required little deep imagining was Neil Diamond’s “(Coming to) America,” a rousing, now particularly poignant, welcome to immigrants yearning to be “Free, only want to be free, we huddle close, hang on to a dream” as they traveled “to a new and shiny place.” Codger had not been familiar with the song, now implanted in his mind. 

The competition eventually came down to Ray Charles version of “America the Beautiful” and John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” There were passionate pitches for both songs.

The Denver song had always seemed to Codger a sentimentalized call for a time that never really existed in a depressed state. But in a time of mounting anxiety it seemed as comforting a fantasy as any other. 

“America the Beautiful,” even in the Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley or Whitney Houston versions, always seemed to Codger a glossy Chamber of Commerce postcard. But he was enthralled by the streaks of pain and anguish with which Ray Charles infused the song, giving it an historical power. It sounded like the America we’re living, and it won as it should have.

It won, wrote David in his highly recommended substack, “The DBrief,” because people wanted “a song that evoked community, a higher calling, a grand vision of the country. They didn’t just want to sing along; they wanted to feel something about the potential of America. If they weren’t receiving that from Washington, D.C., they’d find it on their own, politicians be damned.”

Politicians be damned. That may be what this is all about. Find your hope in music.

So thanks, music guys, for a common place to feel good right now without even the promise of a cash payout if enough of us vote right. We can all sing along to set our souls free.