41st Annual “A Capitol Fourth” (PBS-TV, aired July 4, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s 41st annual “A Capitol Fourth” concert on PBS was an interesting index into how much the fear of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic that virus started has receded. Just over a month before the analogous event, the National Memorial Day Concert, had taken place in what’s become the way we’ve expected during the viral pandemic, coming from various remote locations and held at a largely empty National Mall with all the participants masked except when they were actually talking or singing. This one was held before a big crowd at the Mall even though a lot of the individual segments were still coming in from remote locations, ranging from Los Angeles and San Francisco to the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, fabled original home of the Grand Ole Opry before it moved to “Opryland, U.S.A.,” what amounts to a country-music theme park. Unlike the National Memorial Day “Concert,” which I put in quotes because it’s much more a spoken-word tribute to the U.S. military and its heroes than an actual set of musical performances, the “Capitol Fourth” events are genuine concerts even though no one act was allowed to perform more than one song in a row. There was nothing like the sensation one year when the Beach Boys (or at least the rump group of that name with Mike Love the only original member present) got to do six songs in a row and really showcase the enduring power of their music. (I remember in the early 1960’s liking the Beach Boys better than the Beatles – and I’ve already mentioned several times in this blog the story that when Paul McCartney heard the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds he called the other Beatles together for a band meeting and said, “Brian Wilson has just created the greatest rock ’n’ roll album of all time. We’re going to have to work our asses off to top it.”)

The concert billed Vanessa Williams as “host” – though, blessedly, she mostly stayed out of the way and allowed the various performers to do their things without much inane chatter. She began the show by singing “God Bless America” and then introduced opera star Renée Fleming to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” – and, even though she’s over the hill by opera standards, Fleming responded with a brilliant version of this almost impossibly tough song and even added an extra challenge: on the line “The land of the free,” she soared to an unwritten high note on “free” and held it for ages. The next performer was Cynthia Erivo, who was introduced as having just made a movie for TV in which she played Aretha Franklin (there seem to have been at least two Aretha biopics made since her passing in 2018, this one and one starring Jennifer Hudson – a better choice than Erivo, though of all the singers who’ve come along with Aretha I think Jill Scott has come closest to her style and power). They had her do one of Aretha’s later hits, “Freeway of Love” – and she turned in a nice performance of a nice song, though as with previous Aretha tributes I noticed that they picked a relatively light piece and didn’t go anywhere near her anthemic records like “Respect,” “A Natural Woman” or “Chain of Fools.” At least it was better than the next song up, a remote performance in front of the Golden Gate Bridge of a song called “Drink Up” (which was undoubtedly what many of the Fourth of July celebrants were actually doing!) by a rather lame band called Train. I couldn’t help but think that when I was a teenager in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960’s we had great bands like the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead (I was never a fan but I liked and respected a lot of their music and the culture they built around it), Big Brother and the Holding Company (Janis Joplin’s first band), Quicksilver Messenger Service and, across the bay, Country Joe and the Fish and Creedence Clearwater Revival – and now the best rock band San Francisco can come up with is Train.

Then the show cut to Ryman Auditorium (which, when people get too reverential about it and all the country-music greats that trod its stage in the day, I like to remember that it was also the place where Grand Ole Opry producer Jim Denny told Elvis, “If I were you, I’d go back to driving a truck”), for a song by Alan Jackson called “Drive,” or alternately “Daddy Let Me Drive,” which he wrote as a memorial to his own father for, you guessed it, having taken him for car rides and, when dad felt he was ready, he told young Alan to drive. (Maybe if I’d had a father like that I’d have learned to drive.) The next group up was the a cappella ensemble Pentatonix, whom I like but would like a lot better if they’d lose the drum-machine effects – at first I thought they were actually cheating on the a cappella concept by using a real drum machine, but I’ve since learned the “drum machine” noises are really vocal imitations of one by one or more of the Pentatonickers – but I still wish they wouldn’t do them. Their song was “Seasons of Love” from the musical Rent, which begins with the line “525,600 Minutes,” which becomes so much of the song’s “hook” I long assumed that was its title. They actually did it more soulfully than I’ve heard it before, featuring a woman Pentatonicker as the lead singer, though I’m pretty unfamiliar with Rent and I think I was put off by the way they used the death of its creator, Jonathan Larson, to promote it – almost as if they were suggesting he’d made the ultimate sacrifice to put over his show. (At least Mozart and Bizet lived long enough to see – and, in Mozart’s case, participate in – the premieres of The Magic Flute and Carmen, respectively.)

The next performer was Jennifer Nettles, who was joined by a mixed-race gospel-style vocal group called the Broadway Inspirational Voices, doing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” from the 1943 Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein II stage hit Oklahoma! Having grown up with the 78 rpm version of the original-cast album with Alfred Drake belting out this song in full quasi-operatic drag, it was interesting to hear Nettles do it as soul-pop – not what I’m used to but a quite powerful alternative reading even if Hammerstein’s self-consciously “rural” lyrics fell oddly from a voice like hers. Then Ali Stroker did the song “A Million Dreams” from the P. T. Barnum biopic The Greatest Showman – and did it powerfully. The pull-back shot that showed she’d been sitting in a wheelchair while singing that song was moving, even if also a bit (or more than a bit) exploitative. After that the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jack Everly (for years the National Symphony Orchestra has had two music directors, one for their classical concerts and one for their lighter “pops” fare; Everly is the “pops” conductor and has been leading these concerts since their founder, Erich Kunzel, died in 2009), in John Williams’ “Olympic Fanfare.” The piece was accompanied by video clips from Olympics past – including some black-and-white footage I suspect came from Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Olympia – and it was a nice enough piece of music even though I have decidedly mixed feelings about having the Olympics at all this year (they were postponed from 2020 at the height of the pandemic), especially in a country like Japan where only 4 percent of the population is vaccinated. (There have actually been street protests in Tokyo demanding that the Games be canceled outright.)

The next performer was Mickey Guyton, a singer who somewhat perplexes me because she moved to Nashville with the intent of breaking the color line in country music, and she’s both spoken and sung movingly about her struggles with the ingrained racism of the Nashville establishment – but she doesn’t sound particularly “country” to me. Her songs are much more in the Black soul tradition than anything I identify as country music – and it’s not just because she’s Black, either; after all 50 years ago Charley Pride broke through as a Black country star (though I’ve heard it wasn’t until his third or fourth album that his record company, RCA Victor, dared to put a photo of him on his album covers) and his music was firmly in the country tradition as it stood in the late 1960’s. (According to the commentary in Ken Burns’ Country Music documentary, when Pride played his first concert in Detroit there were shocked gasps from audience members when the announcer called out, “Ladies and gentlemen, Charley Pride,” and a Black man came out; they’d only heard him on radio and records, and they’d thought he was white. I doubt anyone would make that mistake about Mickey Guyton!) She did one of her powerful, impassioned anthems, “I’m Gonna Fight,” and turned in one of the most wrenching performances of the night – but I still don’t think she sounds “country.” The next performer was Laura Osnes, who was called on to pay tribute to the late Walter C. Miller, who directed a number of the “Capitol Fourth” telecasts, and in an interesting song choice for a memorial she picked “Our Love Is Here to Stay” – the very last song George Gershwin wrote before he passed. The next performer was Jimmie Allen, yet another Black artist who’s being promoted as a country singer even though he doesn’t sound especially country to me, doing a song called “American Heartbreaker.” Then Cynthia Erivo returned for one of her own songs, “Remember the Good” – a quiet little soft-soul number that shows off what she can do well (which is not playing or paying tribute to Aretha Franklin!).

Afterwards they cut to one of the cutesy-poo segments that sometimes afflict these shows, a “comic” dialogue between Vanessa Williams and Kermit the Frog (and I found myself wondering who’s voicing him now that Jim Henson, who created the character, is gone) that led into Kermit (or whoever was speaking and singing for him) inevitably doing “The Rainbow Connection.” After that Alan Jackson returned for “America, the Beautiful” and then came one of the real treats of the night: Gladys Knight and a few honorary Pips as her backup singers doing “Midnight Train to Georgia.” Gladys Knight has one of those marvelously trained (no doubt by a choir director in a Black church) soul voices that still sounds as great as ever – as I’ve noticed, when PBS does one of their “MyMusic” specials in which they dredge up old hitmakers of the past the Black singers’ voices have invariably held up better than the white singers’ voices, and I attribute that to the training they got as children in Black churches from choir directors. Singing soul requires as much vocal training and skill as singing opera – and as I’ve said in these pages before, the biggest victims of the myth of the “untrained” Black soul voices are the whites who’ve bought into it and thought all you had to do to sing soul was stand in front of a band and scream. The following number was a much-ballyhooed “premiere” of a new version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” sung by Jimmy Buffett – who played a four-stringed instrument that looks like someone shrunk an electric guitar (I suspect it’s an electric ukulele) and doubled on melodica (the toy-like keyboard instrument the player has to blow through to get it to sound; I’ve seen Nat “King” Cole use it in his surviving concert videos and I think Stephen Colbert’s musical director, Jon Batiste, has used one too). About all that was “new” about this version of “This Land Is Your Land” was that Buffett sang one more chorus than the ones usually done on these celebratory occasions (Guthrie said he wrote the song as an answer to what he regarded as the empty patriotism of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” but usually what we get at these concerts are sanitized versions that only include the first two choruses and make the song sound no more radical than Berlin’s piece):

“When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.”

At least this one mentions the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the mid-1930’s – the event that changed Woody Guthrie from a middling Jimmie Rodgers wanna-be to an impassioned, powerful troubadour for the poor, the outcast, the dispossessed and radical causes in general – but the version still didn’t include the genuinely progressive Leftist verses with which the song concludes (see https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/This_Land.htm) and which I wished Lauren Alaina would record when she did her searing version of the “safe” verses at a previous Capitol Fourth concert in 2020 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLAVn-sKfEY). Then, after an oddball greeting from three American crew members of the International Space Station, a woman named Auli’i Cravalho, who apparently voiced the character of Moana (a woman rather than a man, as he was in the 1926 Robert and Frances Flaherty quasi-documentary film) in the Disney-Pixar computer-animated 2916 release, sang “A Whole New World” from another Disney animated release (traditionally animated rather than done with computers, thank goodness), Aladdin (1992) – and did it movingly if not overwhelmingly. The fireworks display started during “A Whole New World” and continued through the next selection, the obligatory performance of the last four minutes or so of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” by the National Symphony Orchestra, the choruses of the various military branches, along with bell ringers and some vaguely heard (and probably pre-recorded) cannon sound effects instead of the live cannons sometimes used in performances of this piece. (The tradition of using bells and a chorus to sing the words of the Tsarist Russian national anthem when Tchaikovsky quotes the music started with Leopold Stokowski when he was music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra in the 1920’s and 1930’s; the use of actual cannons started with Antál Dorati conducted the piece with the Minneapolis Symphony in the 1950’s for Mercury Records’ “Living Presence” series and cannons and bells were recorded separately and dubbed into the record later for a performance that became a hi-fi “demonstration record.”)

Then Christopher Jackson, who became a Broadway star playing George Washington in the musical Hamilton, did a surprisingly weak-voiced version of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” (if you’re British you know it as “God Save the Queen”!) and the U.S. Army Band (billed as “Pershing’s Own” even though General Pershing is long since dead – the U.S. Marine Band is billed as “The President’s Own,” which at least makes sense since there’s an ongoing supply of presidents, while whatever General Pershing’s descendants are doing now is a mystery to me) played what was billed as “a medley of patriotic songs” including “This Is Our Country,” “76 Trombones” (given the recent – and possibly renewed – presidency of Donald Trump, the inclusion of a song from a musical about a con man seemed weirdly appropriate to both Charles and I!) and “The Caisson Song.” Charles was surprised there wasn’t a full medley of all the U.S. military theme songs – he was looking forward to singing along with the Coast Guard anthem – but obviously this was the U.S. Army band and they weren’t anxious to promote the competition. After that was a real surprise: Vanessa Williams performed what’s been called the “Negro National Anthem,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” at least in part to honor the new Juneteenth federal holiday – and she made it sound quite good even though I still think the African-American national anthem should be a song by Black America’s greatest composer, Duke Ellington, instead of a surprisingly lame piece like this. The show closed with more fireworks as the National Symphony Orchestra and the combined military choruses did “Let Freedom Ring” and a spirited rendition of John Philip Sousa’s inevitable “Stars and Stripes Forever” (including a vocal chorus at the end, though I couldn’t make out many of the words) that segued into what’s probably Sousa’s second most famous composition, “Washington Post March” – though that one got cut off by the closing credits and the acknowledgements to PBS’s contributors, including Boeing. “This celebration of America is brought to you by the military-industrial complex!” I couldn’t help but think.