From the memorial at the Reflecting Pool on Inauguration Eve to the fireworks that ended Inauguration Day, we heard “Amazing Grace” four times.
When Lori Marie Key and, next day, Garth Brooks sang “I once was lost, but now I’m found,” they were speaking for a nation as much as singing to it.
Much like when Lady Gaga sang “thro’ the perilous fight, o’er the ramparts we watch’d,” she described January 6 as much as 1776. And when Jennifer Lopez sang “This land was made for you and me,” she declared that all lives matter.
After Yo-Yo Ma played it on cello, he segued into the spiritual, “Going Home,” finishing with a flourish of “Simple Gifts,” for an American medley. Yes, “Amazing Grace” was penned by a British slave-trader, but it was about his religious conversion which led to his taking up the abolitionist cause. The enslave people he shipped were en-route to the American colonies, most of them to southern plantations where they would sing spirituals such as “Going Home.” Though unsung, Ma’s final bars from “Simple Gifts” added the lyric, “‘Tis a gift to be free,” completing the American pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.
Near the end of “Celebrate America”–a collage of American people and places connected by American musicians of every genre, hosted by American Everyman Tom Hanks–the fourth rendition was a replay of the first, along with Leonard Cohen’s mesmerizing if cryptic “Hallelujah.”
Or was it? No way to prove this, but Lori Marie Key sounded far more controlled and in tune the second night. More so the replay of gospel singer Yolanda Adams’ delivery of “Hallelujah.” Both were visibly fighting the wind-chill when we first heard them, so I suspect we heard prior recordings the second night. With the camera panning the Washington Mall rather than on their faces for most of the time, such a finesse would have been easy.
Since we live in virtual times, no matter. What did matter, and what captured the theme of Pres. Joseph Biden’s Inauguration as much as any song, speech, or poem, was that Lori Marie Key–unlike Yolanda Adams who followed her or Garth Brooks who would deliver the same song next day–is not a professional singer. But she went viral last year as a Michigan nurse who sang the song to her coworkers as the coronavirus pandemic began to overwhelm their hospital. That reminded the Biden team–who then thought to remind us–of Pres. Barack Obama’s eulogy at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Many have noted that the mostly virtual, made-for-TV inauguration was something of a sequel to last summer’s Democratic Convention with scenes from every state and folks from all walks of life. That convention was such a success, why not do it again?
No doubt it was produced and scripted by the same team, and no doubt they noted that the convention’s success was as much heard as seen. From the most heartfelt rendition of the National Anthem ever conceived, sung by children from all of America’s states and territories, to the aching joy of Gabby Gifford’s “America the Beautiful” on French horn, it was a patriotic declaration delivered as musical celebration.
From the wind-chill of the DC night, to a rocking stage in Seattle, to an Atlantic dawn on the Florida coast, to the studios of LA & NYC, to–most purposefully–the resilient streets of Nashville, Joe Biden’s inauguration could be summed up in four words: Of thee I sing.
According to some, 22-year-old poet laureate Amanda Gorman “stole the show” with “The Hill We Climb,” and her accolades are well-deserved. Line by line she reminded us of Lincoln’s “better angels,” of FDR’s “thrill of creative effort,” of Martin Luther King’s “infinite hope,” and of Obama’s “Yes we can!”
She didn’t steal the show. She captured it. And she did it with music in her cadences, inflections, and gestures, as well as in lines that were lyrics. Pick any passage in it and the music is as apparent to the eye as to the ear:
And so, we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us/ We close the divide because we know, to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside/ We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another/ We seek harm to none and harmony for all/ Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true/ That even as we grieved, we grew/ That even as we hurt, we hoped; that even as we tired, we tried; that we’ll forever be tied together, victorious/ Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.
You can hear the echoes from 1961 of Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” the first poem ever read at a presidential inauguration, as if she is answering his opening line: The land was ours before we were the land’s.
“The Hill We Climb” also echoes King’s “Dream” speech by singing it with the same parallels, counterpoints, alliteration, and word-play. As an essayist once noted of King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” words “can reach the mind, but the music and imagination can reach the heart and soul.”*
We may have taken Gorman’s poem too seriously. I have yet to hear anyone mention her self-deprecating joke about “a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.”
Or not seriously enough. Her concluding lines, For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it, are a challenging re-statement of America’s most basic question: “Oh, say can you see?”
For this reason, one more voice was added to the inaugural ceremony. We may have felt bad that Rev. Silvester Beaman of Wilmington, Delaware, had such an impossible act to follow. And in the glare of young Gorman’s moment, many may have missed it. But his Benediction underscored both Gorman’s celebration and Biden’s purpose. If Gorman re-stated the question, Beaman expounded our only answer.
When the minister of an African Methodist Episcopal Church of 30 years did it in the cadences, inflections, and tone of “I Have a Dream,” he completed the ceremony’s embrace of history and hope for the future in both words and music.
In a word, it was Amazing.
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https://www.biography.com/news/amazing-grace-story-john-newton
*Anderson, Mia Klein, “The Other Beauty of Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’,” College Composition and Communication, Feb. 1981. https://www.jstor.org/stable/356342?seq=1
Mouth of the River 