July 4 is a good day to reflect on various renditions of The Star Spangled Banner and God Bless America — captured on videos. From August 2010:
Well, yes, the Star Spangled Banner is a hard song to sing. But we wanted to start off your day with our national anthem with a bang. SO:
OK…maybe that wasn’t quite it…so let’s try someone famous like Michael Bolton (who was a friend of my brother’s when we grew up in Connecticut):
Let’s try it one more time. Perhaps a non-professional will get it right:
But some have put a new twist on it and gotten it right…like the late Marvin Gaye in 1983:
Still, frankly, THIS 20th century song is the song I like the best..and can move me to tears. Here’s the song being introduced by the singer who helped made Irving Berlin’s song so famous. Look VERY closely at the end and you’ll see a famous face:
Even as I watched this, tears came to my eyes.
Here’s a remastered vocal of Smith singing the song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNNltujumHU
Here she is doing a medley of World War II era songs on TV in the early 60s, ending with God Bless America (at 3:35). This is one of her most powerful versions on video.
In 1976, towards the end of her life and her health clearly declining (her final years were very sad as she faced terrible health problems), Kate Smith sang the song before a big audience again — her passion and the song’s power undiminished:
FOOTNOTE: Smith (who died in 1986 at the age of 79) was of my grandparents’/parents’ generations. I loved the song God Bless America, in melody and in lyric, and sought out her work due to that.
No one sang that song — our country’s real, emotional, unofficial national anthem — better than she did.
Reposted from July 4, 2014
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.