This should be the national anthem, and I don’t mean just the song itself but this rendition of it. Accept no substitutes.
It is no accident that Charles starts with what was intended as the song’s third verse, about war heroes. Many people think that’s a tribute to all war heroes, but “mercy more than life” doesn’t apply to any war but the Civil War, and the stately pace Charles chooses helps drive the message home:
O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine!
Quincy Jones produced the song on Charles’ 1972 album “A Message From the People,” larding it up with strings and a choir, but when it was released as a single for the 1976 bicentennial, it barely reached the Top 100 at No. 98. This simpler version, performed live on the Dick Cavett show in 1972, is stripped of those trappings and is stronger for it.
The lyrics we know were actually the result of revision and re-revision by author Katharine Lee Bates, whose poem was inspired by a trip to Pikes Peak. The music was a hymn for “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem” by Samuel Ward, written in 1882, and combined with Bates’ poem only in 1910, after dozens of other tunes had been tried.