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America the Beautiful
Written: 1893
Authors: Katherine Lee Bates (words) Samuel A.
Ward (music)
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One of the best patriotic hymns
is "0 Beautiful For Spacious Skies," also
known as "America The Beautiful." The year
was 1893. Miss Katherine Lee Bates was on a
trip westward across our great country.
Her first
stop was Chicago and the great Columbian Exposition
with its gleaming white buildings. She said this
scene made such a strong impression upon her and
her patriotic feeling, that it was in no small degree
responsible for the beginning and development of
what was to be this much-loved song of America. Her
allusion in verse four to "Thine alabaster cities
gleam" stems from this Chicago visit.
As she
continued westward, she passed through the great
fields of grain and fruited plains, on to the purple
mountain majesties of Colorado. But it was on her
trip to Pike's Peak, from whose summit she witnessed
the far expanse of spacious skies and the sweep of
amber plains, that she then and there began the opening
lines:
" 0
beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of
grain ..."
This hymn reminds America of her noble past, of the
Pilgrims whose stern impassioned stress made a thoroughfare
for freedom. ABS
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