Spitball Army

Faces on a Manhattan subway platform. Loose floral print shirts in the Laguna Beach art district. The signs along the World’s Longest Yard Sale. The shapes in a child’s woodcut puzzle of the United States. The colors in a summer succotash. The smack of a baseball on a wooden bat. A buck dancer and string band sweating under a shade tree. A watermelon chin slurp. The bloom from an exploding rocket over the Boston Hatch Shell. “Successions of men, Americanos, a hundred millions, one generation playing its part and passing on, another generation playing its part and passing on in its turn, with faces turn’d sideways or backward towards me to listen, with eyes retrospective towards me.”*

I can hear the fireworks
I can hear them echoing
I can see the boats in the harbor
Lights shinin’ out
I can hear the people shoutin’
Way up and down the line
And it’s almost Independence Day**

Approximate playing time: 76 minutes.

1. Jake Shimabukuro  “Stars and Stripes Forever”  (2007)
2. Noel Coward  “I Like America”  (1951)
3. Simon & Garfunkel  “America”  (1968)
4. Kim & Jim Lansford  “Cowboy Sings to His Herd”  (1994)
5. Tricia Walker  “Heart of Dixie”  (2000)
6. Bruce Springsteen  “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)”  (1973)
7. Ella Fitzgerald  “The Real American Folk Song”  (1959)
8. Hall & Oates  “United State”  (1980)
9. Billy Bragg & Wilco  “Christ for President”  (1998)
10. David Crosby & Graham Nash  “Immigration Man”  (1972)
11. Dan Bern  “They Don’t Got Baseball”
12. U2  “The Hands That Built America”  (2002)
13. Johnny Cash  “The Gettysburg Address”  (1972)
14. Joanna Smith  “Battle Hymn of the Republic”  (2007)
15. Dave Alvin  “Fourth of July”  (1994)
16. Randy Newman  “Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)”  (1974)
17. Lucinda Williams  “American Dream”  (2003)
18. Gillian Welch  “Elvis Presley Blues”  (2001)
19. Paul Simon  “American Tune”  (1973)
20. Bettye Lavette  “Streets of Philadelphia”  (2007)
21. Sean Costello from How’s Your News  “God Bless America”  (2008)

* Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
** rearranged lines from Van Morrison’s “Almost Independence Day”