America The Beautiful

Here's the sing-along page for my arrangement of America the Beautiful. If you're at the GALA conference in Denver come here my chorus, Desert Voices, sing this arrangement with One Voice mixed chorus from Charlotte, North Carolina. We're performing at 5:00 PM on Tuesday 10 July in the Ellie Caulkins Opera House.


Download the image and come join us! You're welcome to sing along on the last verse. I'll be happy to send pdf files to anyone who asks.


The three poetic verses used in this arrangement are presented backwards, so that the first verse (the famous one that everyone knows) is the last verse we sing. You are invited to stand and sing with us on this verse.


There are decent versions of this lyric that remove the sexist language and tone down the god imagery, but out of respect for the original poem and its author, lesbian poet Katharine Lee Bates, I have chosen to use the original text as it was published in 1910.


Ms Bates took as her inspiration a trip to Pike's Peak here in Colorado in 1893, while she was working for the summer teaching English at Colorado College in nearby Colorado Springs. Revised versions were published in Boston in 1904 and again (paired with Samuel Ward's tune Materna for the first time) in 1910.


I hope to see you Tuesday at the Ellie!