The songs that defined America's patriotism across generations

New York: The history of American patriotic songs offers a lesson about the different ways you can say you love your country.

Composers have celebrated endurance under fire ( “The Star-Spangled Banner” ) and invoked divine approval (“God Bless America”). While Toby Keith's “Made in America” dares anyone to question American eminence, Woody Guthrie's “This Land Is Your Land” and Curtis Mayfield's “This Is My Country” highlight a long tradition of weaving in social protest, as if the advance to a “more perfect union” is only possible through acknowledging imperfection.

Patriotic music is also a story of cultural independence. Well into the 19th century, writers were adapting new lyrics to popular melodies — usually originating in England — as a way of ensuring the songs would be widely known.

“Nowadays, it would be like, ‘Here are my new lyrics that I just wrote, and you can sing them to this Beatles song,'" explains Loras John Schissel, a senior musicologist at the Library of Congress. “Everyone would say, ‘Oh, OK, I know that.’”

Here's a list — admittedly subjective — of some notable patriotic songs, from colonial times to the present.

The legacy of Pennsylvania-Delaware statesman John Dickinson has long been shadowed by his refusal to sign the Declaration of Independence. While he thought the break from Britain was premature, he does have some claim to being the lyricist for the earliest patriotic anthem. “The Liberty Song” is a forthright chant with a melody taken from the Royal Navy march, “Heart of Oak.” Dickinson's lyrics are an assertion of rights and a warning against would-be oppressors, amplifying colonial fears that all would be reduced to servitude: “In freedom we’re born, and in freedom we’ll live/Our purses are ready/Steady, Friends, steady.”

Like Dickinson's song, “Yankee Doodle" wasn't only a statement of rebellion, but of revision and even mockery. “Yankee Doodle” was once a British marching song, tapped out on fife and drums and chanted by British troops in Boston. But by the end of the Revolutionary War, rebels had turned it back on their enemies and used it to accompany British retreat. Now wholly Americanized, “Yankee Doodle” (or “Yankee Doodle Dandy”) is the state song of Connecticut and known to movie lovers as the title to the Oscar-winning, World War II-era film that starred James Cagney.

Imagine a songwriter from a former U.S. territory turning “Hail to the Chief” into a condemnation of the American way. Samuel Francis Smith was a theology student whose hymn to freedom and farewell to tyrants with “haughty steps” rests on the melody of “God Save the King.” It has been quoted during moments of protest (the Rev. Martin Luther King during his “I Have a Dream” speech) and sung during moments of unity. ( Aretha Franklin at President Barack Obama's first inauguration). It also holds a poignant place in Civil War history: According to an eyewitness account, after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, a gathering of Black people in South Carolina spontaneously sang it upon hearing that the state's enslaved population had been declared free.

Julia Ward Howe was a 19th-century abolitionist whose husband was a supporter of the martyred anti-slavery crusader John Brown and who adapted her hymn to the Union cause from the melody of “John Brown's Body,” which she had heard during a public review of Union troops. The lyrics came to her in a haze. “I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind,” she wrote in her memoir. And her song has since been heard everywhere from the 1971 Super Bowl to last year's funeral for President Jimmy Carter.

Irving Berlin first intended his celebrated — and criticized — ode for a World War I era revue. But it didn't quite fit with the show's storyline. Berlin set it aside until the late 1930s, when fears of a new world war were rising. “God Bless America” was something of a break from earlier patriotic numbers, says Stephen Winick, a folklorist at the Library of Congress. It was written by an immigrant, and was a statement of personal allegiance (“Land that I love”) instead of collective force. Some even questioned whether Berlin had the right to compose it. “He got mail from people basically saying, 'How is it that you, this Russian Jew, has any right to ask God to bless America?” Winick says.

The Woody Guthrie standard was a response to “God Bless America,” if only because Guthrie believed that Berlin had failed to appreciate the country's natural beauty beyond invoking “the valleys and the prairies.” Guthrie's lyrical turns also fit the narrative of patriotism/protest, with its poetic imagery (“diamond deserts,” “wheat fields waving”), and its wry defiance — in at least one version of the song — of a seemingly sacred American right, private property: “As I went walking I saw a sign there/And on the sign it said “No Trespassing./But on the other side it didn’t say nothing.”

Chuck Berry once said that he composed his classic tour of rock 'n' roll Americana after feeling homesick during a trip to Australia. Berry's tribute to skyscrapers, jukeboxes and the open road from “the coast of California to the shores of the Delaware Bay” has been covered by Bruce Springsteen, Linda Ronstadt among others. But not everyone saw the song as an all-out celebration. Citing Berry's line about “looking HARD for a drive-in, searchin' for a corner cafe,” critic Dave Marsh once noted that Berry was well aware that many establishments in the 1950s refused to serve a Black man. “Berry never lets you be sure that he's coming to grips with the contradictory mess we've made of things,” Marsh wrote.

Don Raye and Al Jacobs collaborated on this brisk and confident march, written as war broke out in Europe. The lyrics celebrate loyalty and call out for unity across geographic lines: “What diff’rence if I hail from North or South/Or from the East or West?/My heart is filled with love for all of these.” The song has since been played at Disney theme park fireworks shows and recorded by everyone from Pat Boone to the Air Force Heritage of America Band.

Curtis Mayfield's hard-hitting soul composition, recorded with his longtime group the Impressions, was released amid the civil rights movement. It's a history lesson, an assertion of pride and place and a statement that a Black man's patriotism comes out on the other end of unbearable suffering: “I've paid 300 years or more/Of slave driving, sweat, and welts on my back/This is my country.”

Bruce Robinson’s classic, written in 1996 and rewritten in 1999, is narrative country at its folkiest: A story about a lonely American soldier during the Vietnam War corresponding with a young woman back home. It’s both romantic and painful: He dies, she mourns and it serves as powerful reminder of the sacrifices made by service members and those who love them. "Travelin' Soldier” became a hit in 2002-2003 for The Chicks, formerly the Dixie Chicks, during a contentious national conversation about patriotism amid the aftermath of 9/11 and the impending Iraq War. It was revived last year by Cody Johnson.

The post-9/11 moment inspired a new wave of across genres, with particular focus on rock and such country hits as Toby Keith's “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American).” Zac Brown Band’s “Chicken Fried,” originally recorded in 2003, was an ode to cold beer, good jeans and other simple pleasures that became a sleeper anthem because of its often overlooked third verse. “I thank God for my life / And for the stars and stripes / May freedom forever fly, let it ring,” Brown sings a cappella, the lively instrumentation ceasing in exchange for listeners' attention.

Keith had written so many patriotic songs that he considered shelving “Made in America” for fear of overdoing it. A conversation with cowriter Bobby Pinson and actor/singer Scott Reeves inspired his hit about the popularity of cheap, foreign-made products. Keith and Pinson turned out a power ballad about an old man “livin' off the land,” an upholder of traditional values so loyal to all things American that he's willing to “spend a little more in the store for a tag in the back that says ‘USA.’”

Around the time Keith's “Made in America” was released, Jay-Z and Kanye West were working on the protest/patriotic rap “Sweet Baby Jesus,” eventually named “Made in America.” The lyrics are a boast, a reminder and a vow to push forward, as if echoing King's likening the American Dream to a promissory note the leaders had yet to make good on: “Built a republic that still stands/I’m tryna lead a nation, to leave to my little man’s/Or my daughter, so I’m boiling this water/The scales was lopsided, I’m just restoring order.”