Patriotic Music: Somewhere There Is A Star Spangled Flag

America is a tune. It must be sung together. ~Gerald Stanley Lee, Crowds

Somewhere There Is A Star Spangled Flag

There's a Star-Spangled Banner waving somewhere
In a distant land so many miles away.
Only Uncle Sam's great heroes get to go there
Where I wish that I could also live some day.
I'd see Lincoln, Custer, Washington and Perry,
And Nathan Hale and Colin Kelly, too.
There's a Star-Spangled Banner waving somewhere,
Waving o'er the land of heroes brave and true.

In this war with its mad schemes of destruction
Of our country fair and our sweet liberty,
By the mad dictators, leaders of corruption,
Can't the U. S. use a mountain boy like me?
God gave me the right to be a free American,
And for that precious right I'd gladly die.
There's a Star-Spangled Banner waving somewhere,
That is where I want to live when I die.

Though I realize I'm crippled, that is true, sir,
Please don't judge my courage by my twisted leg.
Let me show my Uncle Sam what I can do, sir,
Let me help to bring the Axis down a peg.
If I do some great deed I will be a hero,
And a hero brave is what I want to be.
There's a Star-Spangled Banner waving somewhere,
In that heaven there should be a place for me.



About This Music

One of the most continuingly popular songwriters in the country genre, from the 1920s until his death in 1955, was the "event" composer par excellence, Bob Miller ( Shelby Darnell) . Miller was not of country origin; he was born in 1895, in Memphis, Tennessee. Memphis, however, provided him with a social milieu in which he could obtain a close acquaintance with southern melodies. In the early twenties Miller played the piano for a dance band called the Idlewild Orchestra, which performed on the steamer Idlewild on the Mississippi River.

In 1928 he moved to New York where he worked as an arranger for the Irving Berlin Company before establishing his own musical concern, the Bob Miller Publishing Company. Although he composed numerous blues and popular tunes, the most important items in his repertory ov over seven thousand songs were the hillbilly items.

In the decades following the 1920s Miller produced scores of lucrative and lastingly popular compositions, including the well-known " Eleven Cent Cotton and Forty Cent Meat "; the prison song which has inspired countless others, "Twenty-One Years"; ...and the World War II hit " There's a Star Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere ."