42nd Annual "A Capitol Fourth" (Michael Colbert Productions,Capital Concerts, WETA, PBS, aired July 4, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago at about 8:45 p.m. I put on the streaming program of last Monday night’s 42nd annual A Capitol Fourth, the big Fourth of July all-star concert on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and the first shcu concert since 2019 held without COVID-19 restrictions in place. The concert was hosted by Mickey Guyton, African-American singer who for some reason is billed as a country artist even though her voice sounds much more like a gospel or soul voice to me. I’m glad to see the world of country music open to Black performers – I’m old enough to remember what Charley Pride (who did have a true country voice) had to go through, from his record company’s reluctance until his third or fourth album to print his photo on the cover to the shocked reactions of audiences at his show when the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Charley Pride!,” and a Black man came out. And don’t get me wrong> I love Mickey Guyton’s voice. I just don’t hear it as particularly “country,” and the only thing about her records that sounds country is the use of a pedal steel guitar in her band. Guyton opened the show with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a notorious voice-killer which she negotiated about as well as anybody does (I’ve heard better versions but I’ve also heard far, far worse), and then gave a spoken introduction to the concert while the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jack Everly (who took over the “pops” duties of Washington, D.C.’s symphony after the death of Erich Kunzek in 2009), played John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” – the first of three times Sousa’s most famous march was heard on the program.

The next singer to perform was a young cutie named Darren Criss, who did pleasant but surprisingly emotion-less versions of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” and Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” (the latter from their spectacularly mistitled 1978 album Jazz, which contained nothing that even remotely resembled jazz). When he went from one to the other I thought, “O.K., so you’ve proven you’re no John Lennon. You’re no Freddie Mercury, either.” Next the National Symphony Orchestra played the songs “This Is My Country” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag” under some more Mickey Guyton commentary, and after that Jake Owen, who unlike Guyton is a) white and b) definitely a country singer, did two of his hits, “American Country Love Song” and “I’ll Be Down to the Honky-Tonk.” (in the latter he quoted Garth Brooks’ “Friends in Low Places,” an ill-advised move since, while he’s pleasant enough, he’s no Garth Brooks.) Next up was a vaguely country-ish, vaguely Christian-rockish song by Andy Grammer called “I Found Joy in My LIfe” – he didn’t use the “G”-word but it was pretty obvious the joy he was singing about was spiritual rather than carnal. Then came easily the most overwhelming performance of the night: just as two years earlier Lauren Alaina had electrified the show with her impassioned rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” this time it was gospel singer Yolanda Adams’ turn to shed a blinding new light on an old song, in this case “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Adams gave this song the full-out gospel treatment and reminded us of the life-or-death struggle of the U.S. Civil War. As Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg, America was “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Today we face almost as severe a test as to whether the American constitutional republic can long endure – and Yolanda Adams’ performance of the classic Union song was precisely the inspiration we needed right now to believe in the resiliency of America’s republic government and the ideals for which it stands (even though the Founding Fathers didn’t always live up to their stated ideals; 41 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves, and like most African-Americans Yolanda Adams is descended from slaves).

Anything would have been anticlimactic after Adams’ withering performance, and the person who tried to follow her was Rachel Platten doing a pretty standard inspirational song called “Stand by You” as a tribute to wounded veterans, though Platten rose to some genuinely emotional singing as the song built to a climax. Then modern-blues musician Keb’ Mo’ did a cover of Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” – he didn’t have Withers’ quiet intensity but he still did the song justice. Next up was a quite remarkable young pianist named Emily Barr who performed a solo version of “Stars and Stripes Forever” somewhat in the vein of how a ragtime piano player would have performed it in the early days of the 20th century. Her version was intensely phrased and managed to shed new light on this way overdone piece, and I especially liked the ritard at the end that made the piece sound oddly lyrical. After that Andy Grammer returned for another vaguely spiritual song called “You Saved My Life,” and Lauren Allred came out with “Never Enough,” one of the big power ballads from the P. T. Barnum biopic The Greatest Showman (which I quite liked, especially Hugh Jackman’s performance as Barnum, but I hated the way they used this song as the piece Jenny Lind performed when Barnum presented her in New York; as I wrote in my blog post on The Greatest Showman, instead of an actual opera aria of the kind Lind sang). The next segment was a tribute to the Broadway musical West Side Story on the 65th anniversary of its debut, which was hosted by Chita Rivera, the Anita of the original stage production (though the clips that accompanied the tribute were from the 1961 film in which Rita Moreno played the role), and featured Cynthia Erivo doing a haunting version of the show’s song “Somewhere.”

After that Mickey Guyton got to sing two of her own songs, “All American” (a laudable attempt to compose a song with the message that despite our deepening political and cultural divides, we’re still all Americans and we should be proud of our country) and “I Still Pray.” Then they brought on Gloria Gaynor, of all people, and the commentary tried to transform her one big hit, “I Will Survive,” from a feminist kiss-off of an abusive man to a hymn to survival in the face of adversity. The big fireworks display started before Gaynor had finished her song – my husband Charles, who had come home from work while I was watching the show, joked, “This is much better than a mirrored ball” – and continued through the inevitable closers: the last 4 ½ minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (which by coincidence I’d just seen referenced on a Jeopardy! episode in which the clue was about how much Tchaikovsky hated it), Lauren Allred making it through Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” the U.S. Army Band doing a medley of “The Caisson Song,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” Yolanda Adams singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” and blessedly performing all three verses (though her rendition was hardly as scorching as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”), the National Symphony Orchestra and Chorus doing “America, the Beautiful,” and as the finale the National Symphony Orchestra cranking out yet another version of Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” All in all, it was an acceptable concert, lots of fun and with searing performances from Yolanda Adams and Emily Barr that made the evening great.