The Music Governors Create and Inspire

Abstract

While festive music is a predictable backdrop for every political convention, victory night, and inauguration, the body of songs actually written about American electoral politics is not large. Ballads recounting the actions of specific officeholders are rare and campaign songs written to support particular candidates tend to be forgotten soon after the rally or election for which they were composed.

There is no music so sweet to the American ear as the music of politics.

—Robert Taylor, Governor of Tennessee 1887–1891, 1897–1899

Thanks to Andy Murphy, Rutgers Political Science Professor and director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy for helping to instigate and cosponsor a public presentation of this project; Fellow radio DJs Taylor Caffery, host of Hootenanny Power on WRKF radio in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for suggesting the Jay Chevalier song about Louisiana governor Earl Long and Art Menius, host of From The Roots on WMMT in Whitesburg, Kentucky, for suggestions of songs from the Carolina Nighthawks about New York governor Al Smith and from Champion Jack Dupree addressed to a governor of Georgia; Musicians Gary Kanter of Washington State for alerting me to Phil Ochs’s Joe Hill reference to Utah governor William Spry; David and Ken Kolodner of Baltimore, Maryland, for suggesting inclusion of Sam Houston, and Henry Koretsky of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for suggesting “Tell It to the Guv’nor,” an instrumental by Bela Fleck & the Flecktones and the live version of Warren Zevon’s “Mohammed’s Radio” with recast lyrics that reference Jerry Brown’s romance to Linda Ronstadt (though I couldn’t find a good way to include either in the text); and writers Matthew Kassel of New York City for his insight on the “Fables of Faubus” and Burgin Mathews of Birmingham, Alabama, for writing “Singing Governors, Fiddling Senators” and his generosity in allowing the excerpts on governors to be reprinted.