In honor of Memorial Day, I am re-posting this video which I recorded in 2007. I did a second post with the same video in 2014. It is from a choir concert in which my youngest child participated when she was 11. I will repeat what I wrote in 2014, then add an additional comment after the video.
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Mark Steyn wrote yesterday (actually, it’s an excerpt from his book A Song For the Season) about “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” its history and its unique connection with Memorial Day. Which reminded me of a post I did in 2007. My youngest daughter, eleven years old at the time, participated in a little kids’ choir drawn from all of the elementary schools in our school district, which performed a concert along with choirs from the four high schools in the district. The finale was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which I chanced to record on my digital camera.
I was moved by the performance–and impressed by the fact that a public school district in the North would be so openly patriotic–and posted it here. The recording isn’t great, it has been transposed into different formats a couple of times and uploaded and downloaded. At this point you could say it is a battered old video. But the irresistible power of the song shines through. It is striking, too, that no one involved in the performance, except the choir and band directors, is more than 18 years old. They gave the first verse to the little kids, and then the older kids chimed in. I wish I had kept the camera running to give a better sense of the uproar from the crowd of relatives and townspeople when the performance was over.
The video turned out to be popular. Someone kept the audio, replaced most of the video with patriotic and religious images, and posted it on YouTube. In that form, circulating widely via email, it got a very large number of views. One day a retired serviceman called me to ask permission to show the video at a reunion of his military unit. I said Yes, of course, but was a little bewildered. “Don’t you know?” he asked. “It’s all over the internet!”
So here it is again. I hope you enjoy it. I agree with Mark Steyn that it captures the spirit of Memorial Day better than any other song.
And now for this final comment: I agree with the sentiment expressed in the verse that begins “In the beauty of the lilies…” I don’t think America First should mean America Only. I think that America should continue–must continue–to be a force for freedom around the world. I think that, where it can be done at reasonable cost, a cost that inevitably includes human lives, we should do what we can to help others be free. It is, I think, a part of our calling as a nation that we cannot abandon.
