I would like to know which of the four writers/artists in this week’s unit (Snyder, di Prima, Feliciano, Hendrix) makes you reflect thoughtfully on the life we are living in 2021, either as separate individuals, or as a collective American society. How can literary or artistic expression make a difference in the life you choose to lead? Is the messaging put out fifty or sixty years ago still relevant today? Answer from your own point of view.
If you disagree with something that was said or expressed in this material, you can include that, too.
You can choose to write about one of the people, all four of them, or some combination thereof.
Just be sure to pick out specific lines from the poems or moments from the musical performances as you describe in detail the lessons you are taking away from this unit.
The decision of football quarterback Colin Kaepernick in 2016 to kneel in protest during the playing of the “Star Spangled Banner” at NFL games sparked a controversy that reverberates five years later. Kaepernick, saddened and angered by violence against Black men and women in America, found a high-profile way to register this cultural complaint. The playing of the national anthem before sporting events is designed to foster national unity. But when the nation fails to live up to its ideals, and when it fails to treat the entirety of its citizenry in an equal and equitable manner, symbolic forms of nationalism tend to face another reckoning.
Now, flash back fifty years or so. In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, shortly after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and shortly before Alabama segregationist and third-party candidate George Wallace appealed to racist impulses to win several states in the 1968 presidential campaign (he had also won Michigan’s Democratic primary), Jose Feliciano delivered a version of the “Star Spangled Banner” at Game Five of the World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Detroit Tigers in Detroit. Feliciano’s version of the national anthem was not intended as a protest in the way that sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos asserted Black Power at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. At that time, the two Black track and field athletes wore black gloves, raised their fists, and lowered their heads on the medal stand as the American flag was raised and the national anthem played (“We had to be seen because we couldn’t be heard,” Smith said forty years later). Instead, Feliciano simply offered a musical interpretation of Francis Scott Key’s anthem, playing folk-styled guitar, improvising on the song’s melody in a melismatic Latinx style, and elongating some of its vowel-heavy phrases. Feliciano’s performance might not seem that shocking today, when so many performers put their personal stamp on the anthem. But Feliciano received a thunderous round of boos and catcalls from a predominantly white Detroit crowd. The performance was polarizing enough to make the national news and hamper Feliciano’s career going forward. Give a listen to Feliciano at Tiger Stadium, then click the second link to hear the singer’s reflections on the event several decades later:
Jose Feliciano, “The Star-Spangled Banner” (Detroit, October 1968):
Major League Baseball Network remembrance of Jose Feliciano’s performance:
Less than one year after Feliciano’s rendition, in August 1969, the Star-Spangled Banner received another interpretation at the hands of Jimi Hendrix, regarded by many as the best rock guitarist of all time. The context, however, was far different. Instead of playing at a sporting event, Hendrix was in an upstate New York field playing to thousands of hippies at the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. Closing the three-day festival on a Monday morning, Hendrix ended his set with a long medley, the centerpiece of which was an instrumental rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” played very loud on a white Fender Stratocaster. Hendrix was a master of amplification, modulation, and feedback. He interprets the anthem’s words as sounds in this majestic yet violent performance, offering commentary on firefights in Vietnamese jungles and uprisings occurring in America’s inner cities, both of which endangered people of color. During the “bombs bursting in air” section of the national anthem, Hendrix’s Stratocaster wails, paying witness to the pain inflicted under a nationalist banner: the carpet-bombing campaigns carried out by American aircraft in Southeast Asia, the fiery napalm attacks that burned through Vietnam’s jungle foliage and seared human flesh, and the air raid sirens that always seemed to sound too late. To top it off, Hendrix plays “Taps,” the elegy played for the military dead (usually on a bugle), just before the “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave” section. Then, for good measure, he drops one more whistling bomb just before “the home of the brave” phrase. It’s devastating piece of music because it’s so real.
Hendrix, who would die about a year later due to a drug overdose, received cheers instead of boos on this day. Unlike Feliciano, he was playing to a young counterculture audience disgusted by the Vietnam war and their nation’s role in it. All the same, Hendrix said that he didn’t mean the rendition as an insult to America. After all, he had been a member of the US Airborne unit just before American troops were sent to Vietnam. But as a man of Black and Cherokee heritage, he had seen plenty of discrimination and scenes of injustice, and he wanted a peaceful resolution for conflicts that didn’t necessitate military force. The inclusion of bomb sounds in an anthem known for celebrating militarism made many Americans stop and think when they heard Hendrix’s rendition (millions would see his performance in the award-winning Woodstock movie, released in 1970). To see and hear Hendrix in the summer of 1969 is to regard the way countercultural movements question traditional symbolism and transform a nation. What do national symbols represent? And for whom?
Witness Hendrix at Woodstock:
Jimi Hendrix, “The Star-Spangled Banner” (Bethel, NY, August 1969):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKAwPA14Ni4
