Off to the Inauguration

This is the Catholic church on the corner of my block. Sure it's the school building and not the church itself, but still, it's quite something.

In a few hours, Mary, Mabel and I are taking our life into our own hands and driving south. We'll spend the night at my mother-in-law's apartment just outside of Georgetown, and in the morning we (minus Mabel) will make our way to the Mall. I imagine we'll have to walk most of the way, but we're going to see if the D6 bus can get us part way there. I had tried to get tickets the day after the election, but my three Congressional representatives were already out by that afternoon, so we are going to join the other million-plus ticketless folk crowding the dead grass. I have the feeling we'll end up on the back side of the Lincoln Memorial staring at a Jumbotron in the distance.

Still, it feels worth it.

As someone noted on the AMS-l today, there were two musical moments at yesterday's concert that were particularly special for a student of music and McCarthyism. The first was the performance of Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait, a patriotic piece of treacle Copland wrote in 1942. We know it, however, as the piece of music that Eisenhower pulled from his own 1952 inaugural concert because Republican congressmen objected to the presence of music written by a fellow-traveler.

The other moment was of course Pete Seeger's performance of "This Land is Your Land," with Woody Gutherie's original overtly left-wing lyrics in all their glory, grinning ear to ear:

Pete's nephew, Tony Seeger, teaches in the Ethnomusicology department at UCLA. I was once telling him about my project, and he remembered well the fear his family felt during the early 1950s, even in his own more apolitical wing of the Seeger clan. Tony was only a child then, but he remembered once putting some old labor song on the family record player. His father heard the music and rushed over and pulled the record off--the windows of their house were open, and he was afraid their neighbors would hear the lefty music.

McCarthyism was a long time ago, and the Obama movement has other concerns. If nothing else, Obama's plan to cut taxes for the wealthy shows that the Seeger/Gutherie vision didn't quite penetrate. But for whatever small failures, I'm glad I'll be able to tell my children that I was there on January 20, 2009.