God Bless America

On May 23, 2018, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Irving Berlin’s composition of the song “God Bless America,” the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, an annual initiative established in Washington D.C. since 2004, and that features prominent Catholic leaders, launched an initiative to commemorate the occasion, by offering a recorded version of the famous song free of charge in MP3 format. The song was recorded by tenor Luciano Lamonarca.

The Song

When Berlin wrote the original song in the summer 1918, he was a recruit during World War I in the United States Army’s 152nd Depot Brigade at Camp Upton in Yaphank, New York. The song was thought initially to be part of the military music revue “Yip Yip Yaphank”, but Berlin felt the song was too solemn for a comedy and put it aside for twenty years.

 

In the fall of 1938, as fascism and war threatened Europe, Irving Berlin decided to write a peace song. He recalled the unpublished version of the song that he had set aside in 1918, and shaped it into a second national anthem, “God Bless America.” During the three days in which Berlin revised “God Bless America,” the singer Kate Smith asked him for a patriotic song to perform on her CBS radio program, to be broadcast from the New York World’s Fair on November 10 to honor Armistice Day. Berlin generously signed over his royalty money from the song to charity, and the revenues went to the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts of America.

 

As his daughter Mary Ellin Barrett said, “I came to understand that it wasn’t ‘God Bless America, land that we love.’ It was ‘God bless America, land that I love.’ It was an incredibly personal statement that my father was making, that anybody singing that song makes as they sing it. And I understood that that song was his ‘thank you’ to the country that had taken him in. It was the song of the immigrant boy who made good.” Today, “God Bless America” is considered by many to be a second national anthem.