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That is the national anthem.

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Jimi Hendrix played it on the
morning of August 18th, 1969,

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at the close of Woodstock to a
field that had mostly gone home.

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He kept every note of the melody
exactly where it belonged.

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Around the notes, he let in the war.

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The feedback you just heard is a guitar
imitating rockets and sirens over a

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country that was burning villages in
Vietnam and burning bases in the South.

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He didn't deface the song.

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He played you what was
running underneath it.

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Every Fourth of July, the country
sings a song about itself.

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This is an episode about
the songs that sang back

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This is Groundwater.

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I'm Thomas Stubbs.

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A special one outside the usual run.

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This year, the country turns 250.

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It was declared in Philadelphia in 1776
on a document that said all men are

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created equal, written in part by men who
owned the people who worked their fields.

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The show usually moves the way the
book it comes from moves, one chapter

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at a time, New Orleans, north to
Chicago, and out across the water.

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We'll be back on the map next time.

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This one steps back and
asks a different question.

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250 years in, what has the music been for?

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The answer this episode makes is that the
music has been the country's memory, the

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part of the record that didn't get edited.

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Act one: the first account.

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Start with the founding and
with what the founding left out.

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The men who wrote the
document could write.

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They left a record, declarations,
constitutions, letters,

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ledgers down to the dollar.

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The people they owned were
forbidden by law across most of the

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South to learn to read or write.

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Those people left a record too.

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They sang it.

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The spirituals were
the first American art.

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Not the first music made on this
continent, but the first body of work

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the world recognized as belonging
to this place and nowhere else.

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They were made by people who were
property in a language of double meaning.

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A song about crossing the River Jordan
was also a song about crossing the Ohio

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In 1903, W.E.B.

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Du Bois gave them a name.

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He called them the sorrow songs,
and he ranked them as the finest

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thing the country had yet made.

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It's one wholly original art, the gift
of a people who had been given nothing

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Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, the
Fisk University Jubilee Quartet

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recorded for Victor in 1909.

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The students who first carried these songs
out of the South sang them on tour to keep

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a Black university from closing its doors.

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The song is older than the
recording by at least a generation,

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and nobody knows who wrote it.

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That's the point.

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It belonged to everyone who needed it

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This is the bottom of the record.

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Almost everything else in American
music has this underneath it

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The blues came up out of it after
emancipation, the first of this music to

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put one person's name and one person's
trouble at the center of a song.

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Then the industry started selling it,
sorted the sellers by color of their

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skin, and printed the word race on one
set of records and hillbilly on the other.

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That's the lie this whole
show is named after.

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But the lie is downstream.

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The thing it tried to divide was already
one thing, and it was already old.

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Act two: The Mirror.

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Skip ahead to nineteen forty.

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A man from Oklahoma named Woody
Guthrie is sick of a song.

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Irving Berlin's God Bless America is
on every radio, sung by Kate Smith,

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and Guthrie has been riding boxcars
to a country where a lot of people

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are not feeling especially blessed.

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He writes an answer.

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His first title for it is sarcastic,
God Blessed America for Me.

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You know the song it became.

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Schoolchildren sing it.

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It got sanded down into a round
about how pretty the country is from

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California to the New York Island.

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The version they teach drops two verses.

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In one, Guthrie walks up to a wall
with a sign painted on it that says

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private property and notices that
the back of the sign is blank and

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decides that side was made for him.

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In the other, he stands by the relief
office in the shadow of the steeple,

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watching hungry people line up and ask
the question the chorus only sounds

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like it already answered, whether this
land was in fact made for you and me.

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The country kept the chorus
and lost the question.

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It made the song patriotic by subtraction

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"This Land Is Your Land," Woody Guthrie
recorded for Moe Asch in New York in 1944.

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Listen to what it is before
anyone put it on a poster.

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Plain voice, flat-picked guitar,
and an argument folded into the

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verse they stopped teaching.

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There was a big high wall
there that tried to stop me.

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Sign was painted, said private property.

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But on the back side,
it didn't say nothing.

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This land was made for you and me

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The year before Guthrie wrote his answer,
a song appeared that held the other

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side of the same country up to its face.

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It is the most important three
minutes in this whole episode.

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In the late 1930s, a school teacher
in the Bronx named Abel Meeropol saw

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a photograph he could not put down.

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Two Black men hanging
from a tree in Indiana.

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A crowd of white people standing
underneath, dressed for an

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evening out, some of them
looking straight at the camera.

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Meeropol, who wrote under the name Lewis
Allen, turned what that picture did to

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him into a poem and then into a song.

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He called it Strange Fruit.

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It found its way to Billie
Holiday at Café Society, the one

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integrated nightclub in Manhattan.

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She made it the close of every set.

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The waiters stopped serving.

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The room went black except for
a single light on her face.

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She sang three verses about bodies in
the southern trees, and when the last

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word landed, the light cut out before the
applause could start, and she was gone.

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No encore, ever.

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Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday,
Commodore Records, 1939.

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Her own label, Columbia, was
afraid to record it, so a

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small jazz label put it out.

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Listen to how little she does with it.

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She doesn't perform the horror.

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She names it and lets it stand.

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Here is what the song
made the country look at

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Between the 1880s and the 1960s, more
than four thousand Americans were lynched.

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Many of the killings were public,
announced in the paper beforehand,

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watched by crowds, photographed,
sold afterward as souvenir postcards.

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The House of Representatives passed
anti-lynching bills more than once.

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The Senate let them die.

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The federal government did
not manage to make lynching a

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federal hate crime until 2022,

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just four years ago

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The official record of the country
did not count the dead as they fell.

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The song counted them.

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Three minutes, one voice.

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The photograph Mirapul couldn't put down
turned into something a room full of

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people had to sit in the dark and take

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And here is what the
country did about the song.

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It did not argue with it.

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It went after the woman singing it.

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Harry Anslinger, who ran the
Federal Bureau of Narcotics,

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wanted Strange Fruit gone.

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By Joanne Harry's account, he warned
Holiday to stop performing it.

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She refused.

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So he put his agents on her,
and he did not call them off.

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Through one narcotics arrest, then
another, all the way to a hospital

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bed in the summer of 1959, where
she lay dying with an officer posted

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at the door and a narcotics charge
filed against her as she went.

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She was forty-four.

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You don't send federal agents
after a song that's lying.

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Act three.

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The reckoning and the joy.

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The mirror is not only grief.

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The same century that made Strange
Fruit made the sound of people deciding

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the country could still be theirs.

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In 1963, Sam Cooke heard a song
on the radio by a skinny white kid

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from Minnesota, Blowin' in the Wind.

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Bob Dylan, twenty-one years
old, asking how long a people

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can be kept from their freedom.

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By Peter Gurtelnick's account,
Cooke was unsettled by it.

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Here was the question of his own life,
and a white folk singer reached it first.

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That same year, Cooke was turned away
from a whites-only motel in Louisiana

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and arrested for making a scene about it.

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He sat down and wrote the song
he felt should have been written

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already, "A Change Is Gonna
Come," Sam Cooke, RCA Victor.

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The single came out in December
1964, 11 days after he was shot to

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death in a Los Angeles motel at 33.

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The strings on it are Hollywood.

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The voice underneath them is church.

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It holds the whole thing at once,
how heavy it has been and that

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it is going to change anyway.

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Nina Simone had less patience.

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In 1963, Medgar Evers was shot in
his own driveway in Mississippi, and

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a bomb in a Birmingham church killed
four girls dressed for Sunday service.

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Simone, a classically trained
pianist who had wanted to play

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Bach at concert halls, sat down
and wrote a song in under an hour.

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She performed it at Carnegie Hall in front
of a mostly white audience and told them

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to their faces that she meant every word.

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Mississippi Goddam, Nina Simone, recorded
live and released by Phillips in 1964.

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She set the cruelty to a bright
Broadway melody, the kind of bouncy

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tune you'd hear in a stage musical.

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That's the knife.

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The tune smiles while the words don't.

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Alabama's got me so upset Tennessee made
me lose my rest And everybody knows about

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Even the man who had spent his life as
the country's favorite found his line.

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In September 1957, the governor of
Arkansas called out the National

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Guard to keep nine Black children
out of a high school in Little Rock.

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Louis Armstrong, the most famous and
best-loved Black American alive, careful

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his whole career to stay out of politics,
was about to leave on a goodwill tour of

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the Soviet Union for the State Department.

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He read the news out of
Little Rock and canceled.

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He told a reporter the government could
go to hell, that the way they were

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treating his people in the South made
him sick, and he would not go abroad

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and lie about his country for anyone.

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The State Department had
wanted Armstrong's smile to

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sell America to the world.

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He gave them the rest of his face

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That is the dark side of the record,
but it is not all what the music is.

190
00:14:02,419 --> 00:14:06,799
The same two hundred and fifty years
put four white kids from North Alabama

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00:14:06,809 --> 00:14:11,589
in a room in Muscle Shoals playing
so far down in the pocket that Aretha

192
00:14:11,589 --> 00:14:13,539
Franklin built her career on top of them.

193
00:14:14,449 --> 00:14:19,209
It put a white truck driver in Memphis
singing like a Black gospel quartet.

194
00:14:19,769 --> 00:14:23,349
It put a Romani guitarist in
occupied Paris chasing the sound of

195
00:14:23,349 --> 00:14:24,799
Louis Armstrong with two fingers.

196
00:14:25,709 --> 00:14:29,889
It put a kid in the Bronx wiring
two turntables into an orchestra.

197
00:14:30,959 --> 00:14:34,649
Every law the country wrote to keep its
people apart, the music walked around.

198
00:14:35,459 --> 00:14:37,499
It kept introducing the country to itself.

199
00:14:38,909 --> 00:14:40,599
The crossing was never the exception.

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00:14:40,769 --> 00:14:42,689
The crossing was the music.

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00:14:44,389 --> 00:14:45,339
I'm Thomas Stubbs.

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00:14:46,199 --> 00:14:47,949
This has been a Ground Water special.

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00:14:48,829 --> 00:14:52,859
The book this episode draws from is called
Race Records: The Lie That Split American

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00:14:52,859 --> 00:14:54,729
Music and the Blues That Ran Underneath.

205
00:14:55,679 --> 00:15:00,479
Next time we get back to the map,
jazz crosses the Atlantic, the cousins

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00:15:00,479 --> 00:15:05,049
meet in a Manhattan nightclub, and
a guitarist with two damaged fingers

207
00:15:05,389 --> 00:15:07,159
plays through the occupation of Paris.

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00:15:08,519 --> 00:15:13,419
But tonight, somewhere, a stadium
is playing the anthem over a PA, and

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00:15:13,429 --> 00:15:17,669
fireworks are going up, and under all
of it, the same 12 bars are running

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00:15:17,699 --> 00:15:19,019
that have been running the whole time.

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00:15:19,799 --> 00:15:22,349
The country turns 250 this year.

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00:15:23,069 --> 00:15:25,919
The music is older and it remembers more.

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Thank you for listening