During my first presidential campaign, I developed certain habits around my Debate Day rituals—perhaps even little superstitions. I had to do a short training session and always ordered the same dinner. Then, in the half hour or so before the actual event, I put aside my staff’s notes and talking notes, put earplugs in my ears, and just listened to music.
First there were some jazz classics – Miles Davis’ “Freddie Freeloader”, John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things”. But over time I realized that rap was the right thing to get my head in the right shape. Two songs about defying all odds and total commitment – Jay-Z’s “My 1st Song” and Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” – were almost always on, perhaps because they suited my early outsider status.
Alone in the backseat of the Secret Service SUV on the way to the venue, head nodding to the beat, I felt the pomp, ceremony, and artificiality of my immediate surroundings dissipate. My mind returned to what was most essential to me: the friends and family who had shaped me, the values and ideals that drove me, and all the forgotten voices of people across the country that I wanted to one day represent.
Music as a mirror of America
Music has always had the ability to speak to us and for us – in a way that nothing else can. Anyone who wants to understand the past 250 years of American life would do well to listen to the music that shaped this great nation.
When enslaved people were first brought to our shores hundreds of years ago, the music in their hearts gave them strength and courage for what lay ahead. Spirituals were not just entertainment. They were, as WEB Du Bois would later describe it, “the slave’s articulate message to the world”—a way of insisting on the humanity that others sought to deny them.
The same spirit animated the women’s suffrage movement. Fight songs written to the tunes of “Yankee Doodle” and “America (My Country, ‘Tis of Thee)” became an important part of marches and protests. Since everyone already knew the tunes, the organizers didn’t need to print sheet music. All they had to do was distribute new lyrics.
Later, traveling on freight trains during the Great Depression, Woody Guthrie listened to the songs of Dust Bowl migrants and immigrants. He wrote “This Land Is Your Land” in response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” insisting that this land belonged to the struggling and marginalized as much as to the privileged and established.
Protest songs and social change
This tradition found its fullest expression in the civil rights movement, which was, among other things, a singing movement. “We Shall Overcome” and other gospel songs echoed through prison cells and church basements, creating a bond that no police baton or water cannon could break. And when Mahalia Jackson at the March on Washington Dr. Calling out to King, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!”, she did what musicians have always done in their best moments: She got to the truth—and then waited for the rest of us to follow suit.
In the 1960s and 1970s, pop music continued to drive social change and ask the questions that needed to be asked. During the Vietnam War, protest songs like “Fortunate Son,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “What’s Going On” became the air that this country breathed. At the same time, songs like Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” spoke to those workers who felt the protest movement had nothing to say to them – and served as a reminder that in a nation as large and vibrant as America, you can never expect everyone to sing to the same tune.
Years later, young black and Latino youth from the Bronx used record players to transform popular music again. Like all great music, hip-hop wasn’t just a pastime – it was journalism to the beat, with songs like Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” describing a reality most people in this country had never faced. In the decades that followed, a genre of music created by people demanding dignity and respect became the most popular music in the world.
The strength of American music
None of these expressions existed in a vacuum. The reason American popular music has always been so rich and urgent, so powerfully alive, is because it reflects the colorful, multilingual character of our society – weaving everything together: African rhythms and Irish folk music, concert hall tunes and juke joint blues. That’s why American music is constantly renewing itself, and that’s why, at its best, it resonates far beyond our borders: it carries elements from all corners of the world.
Because it embraces and experiments with so many different traditions, American music has often identified our most pressing problems, conflicts, and contradictions earlier than our politics. Not because musicians are smarter than politicians – although many are – but because music works according to different rules.
Music doesn’t have to win a majority of voters. It doesn’t have to appeal to the lowest common denominator or present a ten-point plan. It just has to be true enough for people to see themselves in it. She just needs to remind people that they are not alone in their fears and struggles, their hopes and dreams. Great music makes us feel seen—more than that, it makes us see others and expands our hearts and moral imaginations. So the Spirituals preached emancipation before the proclamation was signed; thus, rock & roll promoted integration before the Civil Rights Act was passed; and so the protest songs recognized the injustice of the Vietnam War long before the government could admit it.
The music always showed us the way. And finally America followed.
A legacy in sound and belief
At the White House, Michelle and I regularly set aside evenings to honor and celebrate the music that shaped America – from classical and country to blues, Broadway, gospel, Motown, Latin and jazz. And when we planned the Obama Presidential Center — opening in June on Chicago’s South Side — we included a recording studio and performance space so that the next generation of voices can reflect this country in all its beauty and all its flaws and lead us to a better place.
America has always been worth singing about – and these songs are a form of faith. The belief that our unlikely experiment in self-government is not yet over. The belief that America is what we make it. The songs themselves will continue to change, but my greatest hope is that the belief in our democracy remains the same – and that together we can continue the great task of moving America closer to what we know it can be.
BARACK OBAMA is the 44th President of the United States. The Obama Presidential Center opens to the public in June on Chicago’s South Side.
