I hope everybody had a good Independence Day celebration yesterday. Hopefully you still have enough patriotism in your hearts to enjoy these songs about our great nation.

Everclear “This Land Is Your Land” (Woody Guthrie)
It always amuses me that this has become one of our nation’s essential patriotic folk songs. Woody Guthrie wrote the song because he was sick of hearing Kate Smith sing “God Bless America” on the radio. He felt that song was unrealistic and complacent.

People also forget that Woody was quite the socialist and included this seldom-heard verse in the song that’s guaranteed to drive patriotic Republicans crazy:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing;
That side was made for you and me.

Keb’ Mo’ “America The Beautiful” (comp. Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A. Ward)
This is my favorite patriotic song. It speaks to the beauty and plenty of this great country without getting militaristic or overly religious. It’s much easier to sing than the Star-Spangled Banner and would be a much better national anthem, although that will never happen.

Keb’ Mo’ does a wonderful soulful version of this song. In a time when all the great old blues musicians are dropping like flies this young(ish) man is more of a national treasure than ever.

Matmos “The Stars And Stripes Forever” (John Phillip Sousa)
I just love this demented cover of the song that everybody associates with too-loud out-of-tune brass bands. This song is always played with such reverence that it’s good to hear somebody bring a sense of humor to bear on it. The weird thing about this cover is that it travels backward in time, starting with very synthetic-sounding instruments and ending with, you guessed it, a brass band.

Octapella “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee” (comp. Samuel Francis Smith)
Writing patriotic songs is difficult. Thus the need to take the British national anthem and tack on new lyrics to make a song Americans can sing. And the Americans of Octapella do a really wonderful job of singing this one.

The Pickin’ On Hacks “American Idiot” (Green Day)
The Pickin’ On albums are some of the most cynical bits of marketing I’ve ever seen. They don’t even credit the musicians in any way. The producers apparently just round up whatever studio musicians are available when they’ve got the studio time booked, give them enough heroin to numb the emptiness of their souls and roll tape.

That said, I find this stuff interesting and amusing for a song or two, it’s just too monotonous to listen to for a whole hour at a time. In this example they apparently needed to make sure that they could get the CD into Wal-Mart so they sing about “mind-screw” America. Really people, what’s the point of covering this song if you can’t even say “mindfuck?”