In this summer of our discontent, is there a song that expresses our national predicament? I nominate Paul Simon’s “American Tune” (1973), especially the version from Simon and Garfunkel’s Concert in Central Park album, recorded live in 1981.
Simon’s beautiful, melancholy anthem gives voice to the dashed hopes—the sense of unfulfilled promise—that I’m feeling as I consider the state of this great republic.
I’m a romantic at heart on the promise of America, which is why I was drawn to the study of American religion in the first place. But as a historian, I’m also aware of how often the United States of America has failed to live up to its promise. The realization of falling short as a society is overwhelming this summer, which is why I find the second stanza of “American Tune” so haunting:
And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
or driven to its knees
But it’s all right, it’s all right
We’ve lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
we're traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what went wrong.
The music haunts me as much as the words. To my knowledge, it’s the only modern hit based on an old Lutheran chorale, “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” by Hans Leo Hassler. That tune resonates with something deep in my Lutheran psyche. (Though I’m now an Episcopalian, my DNA is 100 percent Lutheran; my father, grandfather, and two uncles were Lutheran pastors, and my parents met while working at a Lutheran college.)
“American Tune” is a secular version of the old Lutheran Passion hymn. In part, it’s a lament for the suffering we’ve visited upon each other, whether through complacency, callousness, or indifference. The pandemic has cast a harsh light on societal inequities, on the disproportionate burden carried by the sort of weary worker who narrates Simon’s song.
“American Tune” can also be heard as a lament for political folly (“I can’t help it, I wonder what went wrong”). How did we as a nation manage to elect a president who seems incapable of empathy, incapable even of smiling? Rather than uniting us behind a sense of common destiny, our president seeks only to divide and conquer.
Yet “American Tune” isn’t all lament but ends on a hopeful note. The last stanza reminds us again of the promise of America, the quest for a better life that has persisted through great challenges and hardships:
We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age’s most uncertain hour
and sing an American tune.
In this uncertain hour, I pray that we’ll learn anew the American tune—the sacred anthem of our recommitment to each other.
© 2020 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved