Tunesmith Jerome Kern: Inaugural Ditty
The deep emotional resonance of the inauguration in Washington today had everything to do with the extraordinary ascent of our first President of color, but little to do with the power of his words. To me, the speech was thoughtful, serious and substantial, but not (as many had hoped) inspired or inspiring in the manner of Lincoln, FDR or even Kennedy. One thing you could say for it: There was no demagoguery. He low-keyed it, giving the adoring crowd little occasion for cheers or sustained applause.
It’s disconcerting when one of the most memorable moments of the speech—one that the NY Times chose to put up near the top of its account of this historic occasion—echoes the lyrics of a bouncy 1936 Jerome Kern ditty.
Pick Yourself Up goes, in part, like this:
Will you remember the famous men
Who had to fall to rise again?
…Pick yourself up,
Dust yourself off,
Start all over again.
They probably wished they could have started the oath of office all over again: The most astonishing part of the ceremony was the double-flub of that solemn moment, which I gather, was chiefly Chief Justice Roberts‘ fault for scrambling the proper order of words. Don’t they rehearse these things?
A factual flub also needed a do-over: Obama was not the 44th American to take the the presidential oath, as he stated in the third sentence of his inaugural oration. One of Jerome Kern’s “famous men” whom we “will remember” (or should) is Grover Cleveland, who served as both the 22nd and 24th President of the United States.
For best deployment of words, my vote goes to the final speaker, who delivered the spirited, sparkling benediction—the 87-year-old Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He’s got a long-time reputation for “rhyming and rollicking,” as evidenced by the 1997 NY Times account of his farewell address to the SCLC. He injected a needed dose of wit and ebullience into the proceedings.
And it fell to Rev. Lowery to finally echo the Obama campaign rallying cry that we were all waiting for:
Yes we can.