In this 250th anniversary year of the United States, pianist Lara Downes is traveling the country collecting conversations with scholars, searching for our history through songs. Her latest stop is New York, for a visit with linguist John McWhorter, a columnist for The New York Times and Columbia University professor.
John McWhorter and I first bonded over our mutual enthusiasm for the music of Scott Joplin, who transformed the sound of America with his infectiously exuberant ragtime melodies. Listen to Joplin's joyful tunes — Maple Leaf Rag, The Entertainer — and you'd never guess the tragedies that ran through his life, from Jim Crow-era oppression to romantic misfortune and financial ruin. Joplin summoned the magic of music to conjure light from darkness and joy from despair, the way music has done ever since the first humans sang the first songs.
That magic can be found throughout the soundtrack to America's 250 year history, but with a singular expression — a persistent, optimistic energy that has powered this nation forward. The pursuit of happiness, after all, is one of our founding principles.
McWhorter and I began our discussion with songwriter Harold Arlen, a good example of how American music has echoed that pursuit since the country's earliest days, when the songs of enslaved Africans dared to imagine the joys of deliverance. In every time of trouble, music has lifted our spirits. During the Civil War, songs like "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" soothed the wounded soul of the nation. The years of the Great Depression are chronicled in the pages of the Great American Songbook, with its happy-go-lucky songs that belie the sorrows of their times. During the dark days of World War II, it was Arlen who reminded the American people that "somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true."
As we navigate present-day crises and chaos, we reflect on the power of a happy tune to give us comfort, strength and the courage to keep dreaming our dreams.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Lara Downes: Harold Arlen wrote the song "Get Happy" sometime in the fall of 1929, before the stock market crash that launched the Great Depression. By the next year, the song was in the top 10 on the pop charts. It's such a hummable, optimistic tune in such a disastrous time. And I'm imagining the comfort and energy that came with that song playing over the radio into America's kitchens and living rooms.
John McWhorter: The show that "Get Happy" was written for ended up premiering [not long after] the stock market crashed, which means that when Arlen wrote it, nobody knew what was about to happen. But the song became a hit when the whole country had just fallen to pieces. At the same time, Mickey Mouse is dancing around and there are these popular songs. It really was kind of a therapy. I think those people were coping in a way.
The phrase "Get happy" comes from the Black gospel music tradition. It's a reference to receiving the Holy Spirit with that ecstatic singing that happens in a gospel church service. When I think about Harold Arlen choosing that title and that hook for the song, it really makes me think about the origins of so much of our American music, which comes from those Negro spirituals and work songs that evolved at the very beginning with enslaved Africans — songs that were an outlet for expression and communication and a way to imagine a better life.
It's interesting … George Gershwin and Cole Porter, their melodies and harmonies were founded partly in Blackness, but when it came to writing something with a Black feel, they would do it deliberately, now and then, in a pastiche way, like the Gershwin brothers in their "Clap Yo' Hands" number from Oh, Kay! and things like that. But with Arlen, he was somebody who Ethel Waters called "the Blackest white man I ever knew." He had this feel.
It was Ted Koehler, his lyricist, who actually came up with "Get Happy," I'm sure, with the encouragement of Arlen, because he would have known the phrase "get happy." They went on to write lots of songs with that feel, where you'd swear somebody Black wrote it, like "Stormy Weather."
The whole lyric of that song is specifically about getting ready for the judgment day. It's kind of impersonating ...
A kind of spiritual.
Yes.
And in a way, almost more infectious than some real spirituals. They were channeling something real. So that "Get Happy" feels like such a Black song that I don't think any Black person would feel inauthentic singing it. That's one that just joins America together.
It's funny to think about, because 1929 was still a time when Black composers were all over those spirituals, turning them into everything from concert music to more pop forms of songs. It's still primary source material.
One of us has to say this because it really is true: I hate to bring Arlen into this, but they had this huge pop hit, and probably both of them bought houses on the basis of it. Whereas there were all of these Black composers who could have written the same sort of thing and nobody would have paid any attention. Nevertheless, it does mean that the Black contribution to the American musical scene was made, although it had to be a kind of a u-turn because of the way things were back then.
Speaking of "Get Happy" kind of falling into place just as the world stops, I think there are songs that are intentionally written to address specific moments. And then there are other songs that accidentally fall into a moment. I'm thinking about Stephen Foster, who wrote the song "Hard Times Come Again No More," back in 1854. It's a really personal song, about his own personal hard times: He made bad business decisions, he had no money, he was an alcoholic, his marriage broke up.
A damn mess.
But then comes the Civil War a few years later, and that song takes on this universal message about suffering and hardship. It becomes a kind of anthem of wartime. And I'm thinking about the way that artists, writers, musicians create work that is personal, that tells their story — and then somehow that translates into everybody's story.
The thing that gets me about Foster is just the tidiness of those harmonies, the incredible clean beauty of them. And let's face it, there was no Arnold Schoenberg yet, but still he was very good at creating the harmonic progressions that sound like warmth and truth. Apart from what a lot of the lyrics were about, the music stands up today, I think, partly because of a certain universal quality of coherence in it. The music is so charming and so perfect that I can very much understand why America loved what he did and that they may have even felt that as a kind of therapy.
What I hear in it is safety — safety and comfort. Think about it: It's the Civil War and everyone's dying, and everything is mayhem. And those parlor songs are giving you this nostalgic feeling of comfort and safety and home, which, honestly, I think, is what we still experience now when we listen to "Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair." Look, I think nostalgia is the most universal condition that we as Americans share.
Yes, nostalgia and also short memories.
Speaking of a time and place, I know from my own personal experience as a musician, and from talking to my friends and colleagues who are music makers, that in these hard times it's confusing. There are choices you have to make about the role you take as, you know, a dancing mouse. [Laughter] The role you take in our society. Do you want to chronicle the hardship and the suffering and interpret this moment in real time? Or do you accept the job of being an entertainer and try to move past your own feelings of sadness and try to make that thing that makes other people feel better?
What do you think? I'm asking you as a professional musician.
I wiggle around with it. Honestly, it depends on the day and the moment and the mood. I think I want to do both of those things, and I think I can. And maybe the answer to that comes with the way that I believe music can teach us our history. And we address this question of who we used to be, who we are now, and where we're going.
That makes me think about being the writer that I am — and not fiction, but somebody who writes editorials and nonfiction books. Where I think it's maybe intuitive that a musician is not going to spend their whole career writing about sadness and despair, I think there's an expectation, especially if you are a Black writer, that you're going to devote probably most of your time to chronicling racism, for example, and how you feel being Black, and specifically the negative aspects of it. And if you don't cover that enough, if that isn't your main beat, you're considered to not be doing the right thing. And my thought has always been — and Zora Neale Hurston said the same thing years ago, but she was right then and she would be right now — that yes, you want to cover the bad things, but if you're a human being, you also want to cover things that just make you happy.
I'm thinking about one artist these days who's absolutely chosen to be a spokesperson for joy — and I think that his whole heart and soul is in it — and that's Jon Batiste. Since he was a kid busking on subways, his message has been: Come together; experience joy collectively. And the music is part of that. He had a song in 2021 called "We Are." And what he's doing with that song is invoking the ancestors and their very persistent faith in the power of joy. But it's also a song to rally us in our own times of trouble.
Talk about a virtuoso. I mean, he's just off the charts. The kind of joy that he pervades, there's a little part of me that always thinks of it as a bit of a pose. And I'm wrong. But sometimes I'm a little bit afraid of those calls for joy. Maybe because I am a slightly depressive person, maybe because I think too much. I never thought about that until now, because he's doing exactly what I think we're both saying musicians should do. There's no reason for me to hear it as false.
I think that when things are really dark, joy isn't easy. But the thing is, joy is a radical act — the encouraging of it, the sharing of it. And I think in our music, we might have a unique approach to that as well, because we keep vocalizing hope and the possibility of joy, and insisting on it.
Part of being American is that focus on the great day coming. The idea that we are an experiment that's always going on. It's just that it's easier to think that things don't change than to understand and to embrace that change generally happens slowly, but it does happen. It's human to try to make the best of the worst. That's how our hormones work in our brains.
We as Americans, we center joy. It's in our founding promise, the pursuit of happiness.
Tom Huizenga and Vincent Acovino produced the audio version of this story. Tom Huizenga produced the digital version.
(Playlist image courtesy of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History)
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