Even though my candidate of choice didn’t prevail yesterday, voting always makes me feel good — about myself, but especially about my country. There is something deeply moving and profound, quiet but enormous, reaffirming and empowering, about going to the polls on Election Day and casting your ballot in this huge and diverse nation where we manage to settle disagreements by elections, not roadside bombs or terrorist attacks.
When I woke up this morning, I still felt good about our election. On my walk through our quiet neighborhood, I wanted to listen to music that expresses, to my mind at least, a little bit of that uplifting mixture of emotions that I feel when I vote. I donned my iPod and thumbed to my Americana playlist, which is a compilation of songs of every different category and classification, linked together only because they all — through message, or genre, or context, or something else — seem quintessentially American to me. I listened as the dogs and I strolled along this morning, savoring an eclectic mix of music that reflects the broad, sweeping nature of this land and its people, and counted myself lucky that I was born an American.
The first 20 songs on my Americana playlist are:
Ashokan Farewell (The Civil War soundtrack)
Sweet Georgia Brown (Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli)
Air Mail Special (Benny Goodman And His Orchestra)
Over The Rainbow (Judy Garland, The Wizard Of Oz Soundtrack)
Polly Wolly Doodle (Leon Redbone)
Dipper Mouth Blues (Arturo Sandoval)
My Girl (The Temptations )
Someone To Watch Over Me (Frank Sinatra)
No More (The Blind Boys Of Alabama)
Dig My Grave Both Long And Narrow (Amasong)
Summertime (Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong)
Blowin’ In The Wind (Bob Dylan)
Goodnight Louise (Boz Scaggs)
When The Saints Go Marching In (Dr. John)
50,000 Names (George Jones)
Anything Goes (Helen Merrill)
Calling My Children Home (Emmylou Harris)
Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be) (Natalie Cole, Live)
They’re Red Hot (Robert Johnson)
The Cascades (Scott Joplin)
Thirty years later, music still sets my mood. I’ll thumb the iPod menu down to the Shuffle Songs setting for my morning walk, and the randomly selected songs I hear will stick in my head for hours, playing in a continuous loop during mental down time moments until a new song pushes them aside. And I can help that process by selecting songs to match my appointments for the day. If I’m going to be doing some careful analytical thinking, nothing can prime that high-end mental pump like the intricate melodies of J.S. Bach and his baroque music buddies. If I’ve got a deposition that might be contentious, I’ll try to soothe things in advance with some Coltrane. If I will be writing, I’ll look for something upbeat and flowing. And if I ever needed to storm the barricades, I’d play Rage Against The Machine’s The Battle Of Los Angeles.
