“We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration”: Lyrical Messages About an Inclusive America

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: Lyrical Messages About an Inclusive America
By JON PARELES
Published: January 18, 2009


(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Bruce Springsteen performed at “We Are One,” a concert on Sunday at the Lincoln Memorial celebrating Barack Obama’s inauguration.

WASHINGTON — Gospel and soul set the tone on Sunday afternoon for “We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln Memorial.” The African-American music that finds the promise of hope amid tribulation was just about everybody’s music at an all-star event designed to be somberly uplifting and devout, as well as celebratory without triumphalism.

The county music star Garth Brooks had a youth choir — in red and blue windbreakers — singing along as he segued “American Pie” into the Isley Brothers’ soul classic “Shout” and then his own ’We Shall Be Free,” a gospel-rooted song about community and the end of discrimination. And the concert’s finale belonged to Beyoncé, whose “America the Beautiful” started out sultry and turned into a hymn.

In some ways, “We Are One” was the kind of all-star inaugural pageant that also began the Clinton presidency: pop performances sandwiched between quotations from presidents — and, at “We Are One,” from Rosa Parks and Thurgood Marshall — calling for unity and renewal. Hundreds of thousands of people attended, and it was telecast and broadcast live by HBO and National Public Radio....

Yet “We Are One” was also very consciously a recognition that Mr. Obama is America’s first African-American president-elect. There was video from the concert Marian Anderson gave at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, after being refused the use of Constitution Hall. When the sexagenarian soul singer Bettye LaVette and the New Jersey rocker Jon Bon Jovi sang Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” they changed the last verse to declare: “A change has come.” And when U2 sang “Pride (In the Name of Love),” its song about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Bono spoke about the 1962 March on Washington and added, “On Tuesday, that dream comes to pass!”...

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It was, by design, a concert full of messages about an inclusive America. Its penultimate song had Mr. Seeger, who survived being blacklisted during the McCarthy era, leading a singalong on a full-length version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” with one of his admirers, Mr. Springsteen, by his side. Tom Hanks narrated Aaron Copeland’s orchestral setting of quotations from Lincoln, “A Lincoln Portrait.”

But not all was earnestness. When Jamie Foxx followed quotations from Thurgood Marshall with quotations from Mr. Obama, he did an affectionate impression of Mr. Obama’s own delivery — drawing laughs down the length of the mall, and a broad, delighted smile from the president-elect.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/arts/music/19weareone.html?hp

[JDPriestly]

1. Beautiful concert. Beautiful article.