This Land Is Your Land concert to celebrate America’s beauty, complexity

Houston Chamber Choir founder and artistic director Robert Simpson’s other job, supervising the music at Christ Church Cathedral downtown, has given him some insight into the unique ways songs can back up — and sometimes change — what people believe.

“The repetition of singing theology that is not accurate, or at least does not reflect the feelings of the denomination, can be a real detriment,” he says. “Just extrapolating from that, one of the things that singing has to offer is that it allows a person to take the sounds and the words into themselves and, on repeated singing, make them a deeper part of their own character.

“So I think we have to be very careful about what we sing, and make sure that we believe what we sing,” he continues. “The old adage is if we don't sing what we believe, we'll eventually believe what we sing.”

Taking that idea to heart, Simpson began reflecting on how turning to the nation’s shared musical past might help steer the choir’s audience toward, to use Lincoln’s words, the better angels of our nature. Then the pandemic got in the way.

Never mind that Saturday’s concert at Miller Outdoor Theatre, entitled “This Land Is Your Land,” has been a few years in the making. With yet another contentious election looming, Simpson’s notion has lost none of its currency. That said, he hopes the show will be a politics-free zone.

“This is not a preachy kind of concert,” he says. “This is a concert to have fun and come and hear great music, and enjoy our country through song.”

It’s not especially easy to devise a 90-minute program that can accurately capture a nation that stretches from the Everglades to Puget Sound. But Simpson did at least have a starting point: Woody Guthrie’s title song, which the Oklahoma folk singer wrote as a rejoinder to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”

“He found that was a song that that didn't represent America: that it glossed over some of its imperfections or some of the things that were, he felt, inequities in both the power and sharing of wealth, and so he wanted to have a song that was more representative of his views,” Simpson says.

The concert will begin with “America the Beautiful,” but besides “celebrating America from sea to shining sea,” Simpson wanted to do so “without becoming overwrought with the patriotic zeal that sometimes is less than helpful.” The goal, he adds, is to “reclaim the goodness of America and to remember the things that do bind us together as a people, wherever we come from.”

America’s musical past can be as fraught as the rest of its history, but Simpson wanted “This Land Is Your Land” to be as inclusive as possible. He split the concert into seven segments, spanning William Billings’ Revolutionary War-era anthem “Chester” to the popular protest tunes of the 1960s. Some reflect expansion across the continent (“Low Bridge,” “Oh Shenandoah”), while others the immigrant and African-American experiences. Simpson also included a selection from “Circlesong,” English composer Bob Chilcott’s suite based on Native American poetry; the chamber choir released a recording of “Circlesong” this past January. 

Still others, like the pointed 19th-century tune “No Irish Need Apply,” show a nation perpetually struggling to live up to its stated ideals. “The reality [is] that we have founded ourselves on a country that is not always as welcoming to the newest among us as we should be,” Simpson says. “And so this is not a new problem, but one that we've contended with before and we will overcome it, I have no doubts.”

To Simpson, “This Land Is Your Land” can be taken as a sort of quilt, with room for Stephen Foster and “Circlesong,” the great spiritual “Steal Away” and John Williams’ “America: The Dream Goes On.” It’s something he learned in his own youth, as the music of Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul & Mary, and Pete Seeger (among others) awakened a new generation — and, by extension, a country — to the power of American song.

“They were an important part of changing America, of making the politicians and those in power realize that they were leading where no one wanted to follow,” Simpson says. “These songs became anthems for that, and I think that they’re a very important part of our history.”

Chris Gray is a Galveston-based writer.