By David and Charlotte Anderson
She described it as “the greatest musical experience” of her life, the night the song was “presented as never before” and witnessed by “some 200 countries.”
Lindsay Terry had been asked to train a choir of 150 young voices. Alicia Keys was the soloist. The event was Super Bowl XXXIX.
The children who sang and signed were deaf and blind.
Unable to see how beautiful America is for its “spacious skies, and amber waves of grain”; unable to hear the sound of pilgrim’s feet “whose stern impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness,” still they sang, and they signed, a prayer for God’s grace to shine, America’s character to refine: “America the Beautiful”.
From the red, white and blue waving proudly its colors below the blue skies and the white glaciers of Washington’s Mt. Rainier, to the same colors framing a church in Jonesborough, Tennessee; from the green of early spring grain fronting a single barn’s shining roof below mountain’s majesties and the spacious skies in Marblemount, to the towering silos and rolling hillsides of Kingsport.
America is beautiful.
I really enjoy your writing, David. Thank you.