Five Quintessentially American Recordings For Cranking Up on Independence Day

First, let’s give the obligatory nod to the three songs that comprise the canon of Patriotic Essentials: the national anthem, Stars and Stripes Forever, and the Battle Hymn of the Republic. 

Now, on to our list of, shall we say, secular essentials.

Johnny B. Goode – The blazing guitar intro, actually lifted from the Louis Jordan tune “Ain’t That Just Like A Woman,” sets the table for this ode to musical ambition and the joys of the bent third and seventh. It’s as pure and distilled a rock and roll record. as has ever been produced. Berry lived that ambition, coming out of the dance halls of the St. Louis area to the Chess studio in Chicago with a hairdresser’s license and a stretch in the hoosegow for armed robbery. He was a combination of rule-breaker, storyteller, master of stage antics and forger of the rock ethos that has informed 95 percent of popular-music guitar playing ever since.

Hey, Good Lookin’ – As a songwriter, Hank Williams was a master of both of the major twentieth-century popular-music forms: the 12-bar I-IV-V blues and the 32-bar AABA form. Here, he’s working in the latter, crafting an ode to courtship with a distinctly rural Alabama flavor. When he was introducing it before a performance at the Grand Ole Opry, he said it had “bought us a lot of beans and biscuits.” Rightly so.

One O’Clock Jump – The original lineup of the Count Basie band embodied the Kansas City/territory-band ethos. KC, and other cities on the territory-band circuit, were oases of after-hours jam sessions and Prohibition-flouting. The center of the country was Party Central. Basie’s piano intro makes clear his familiarity with the boogie-woogie eight-to-the-bar left hand convention. All the greats turn in timeless performances, Lester “Prez” Young on tenor sax in particular.

Mystery Train – Elvis Presley’s re-do of his Sun label mate Junior Parker’s R&B record of a couple years early, evokes travel by that most American form of transportation in the most atmospheric circumstance possible: in the middle of the night, heading into Memphis to bring the Hillbilly Cat’s baby back. and it’s all done with just three players: Elvis, Scotty and Bill. Elvis is exuding confidence by this time. It’s said that the previous year, while he still had his day job as a truck driver for the Crown Electric Company, he heard his first record, “That’s Alright,” on the radio and was so freaked out he ducked into a darkened movie theater and hid in the back row. Those days were now behind him.

Dancing In the Street – penned by one of the great Motown songwriting teams, Marvin Gaye and Mickey Stevenson, this one covers it all geographically, from Baltimore to Chicago to New Orleans. Martha Reeves’s story is an American tale of being in the right place at the right time. She was an aspiring jazz singer, nursing a drink at Detroit’s Twenty Grand Club one evening, when Stevenson began schmoozing her, working hard to impress her with his status as a Motown staff member. He gave her his card and told her to come by his office the following day. Thinking it was her big break, she did so, but Stevenson put her to work answering the phone. For free, no less. After two weeks, her dad insisted she tell this Stevenson character he’d better start paying her, or she was done. He did, and she and her friends finally started getting backup work, beginning with Gaye’s “Stubborn Kind of Fellow.” “Dancing In the Street” can be heard as a kind of plea for national unity at a time, not unlike our own, when divisions ran deep. Is it too much to ask that perhaps we could do some swayin’ to records playin’ and forget our differences for a day?