America the Beautiful
Channel: all the knowledge of the universe PRINCIPIA
Date: 2021-12-02

America the Beautiful, by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki?curid=651 / CC BY SA 3.0

#1895_songs
#American_Christian_hymns
#American_patriotic_songs
#Pikes_Peak
#History_of_Colorado_Springs,_Colorado
#Songs_based_on_poems
#Grammy_Hall_of_Fame_Award_recipients
"America the Beautiful" is a patriotic American song.
Its lyrics were written by Katharine Lee Bates and its music was composed by church organist and choirmaster Samuel A. Ward at Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey.
The two never met.
Bates wrote the words as a poem originally entitled "Pikes Peak".
It was first published in the Fourth of July 1895 edition of the church periodical, The Congregationalist.
It was at that time that the poem was first entitled "America".
Ward had initially composed the song's melody in 1882 to accompany lyrics to "Materna", basis of the hymn, "O Mother dear, Jerusalem", though the hymn was not first published until 1892.
The combination of Ward's melody and Bates's poem was first entitled "America the Beautiful" in 1910.
The song is one of the most popular of the many U.S. patriotic songs.
Commemoration plaque atop Pikes Peak in July 1999 In 1893, at the age of 33, Bates, an English professor at Wellesley College, had taken a train trip to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to teach at Colorado College.
Several of the sights on her trip inspired her, and they found their way into her poem, including the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago,
the "White City" with its promise of the future contained within its gleaming white buildings; the wheat fields of America's heartland Kansas,
through which her train was riding on July 16; and the majestic view of the Great Plains from high atop Pikes Peak.
On the pinnacle of that mountain, the words of the poem started to come to her, and she wrote them down upon returning to her hotel room at the original Antlers Hotel.
The poem was initially published two years later in The Congregationalist to commemorate the Fourth of July.
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