Looking forward to our 55th annual Loyalty Day Celebration in a few weeks, I’m thinking of the song we’ve all sung a thousand times – whose first verse we know by heart. “America the Beautiful” has been called a hymn, a prayer, even the “national heartbeat music,” and many bills in Congress have tried to replace our national anthem – “The Star-Spangled Banner” – with this more lyrical, less militaristic patriotic song.

But who knows the story behind the song? Aware of its evolution into a signature patriotic song, all of us may more fully appreciate “America the Beautiful’ in these troubled times, and perhaps join many others who consider it our finest expression of patriotism.

“America the Beautiful” was composed by a pioneering poet and professor from Wellesley College. Inspired by the glorious panorama from Pike’s Peak, Colo., Katharine Lee Bates, 33, published her poem on July 4, 1895, in The Congregationalist, a weekly newspaper, later revising her lyrics in 1904 and 1913.

Americans embraced the poem and immediately set it to music, trying out at least 74 melodies, “Auld Lang Syne” being one of the most common. The version we sing today is sung to a melody written in 1882 by Samuel Augustus Ward, a Newark, N.J., church organist and choirmaster who originally composed the melody (also called “Materna”) to accompany the words of a 16th-century hymn, “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem.”

When the National Federation of Music Clubs sponsored a 1926 contest to elicit new music for Bates’ poem, Ward’s music prevailed. Bates never met Ward and, except for one $5 fee, never received any money for “America the Beautiful.”

Completing her ascent of Pike’s Peak, the exhilarated Bates remarked, “It was then and there, as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those amply skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind.”

The opening verse read “O beautiful for spacious skies / For amber waves of grain / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain.” The original first line, however, read “O, beautiful for halcyon skies.”

“Halcyon” is a beautiful Greek word, based on a name for a bird that nested in the sea during winter solstice, allegedly calming the waves. Meaning calm or peaceful, the word halcyon nevertheless seemed too unfamiliar and didn’t evoke the West, so Bates substituted “spacious,” which not only described Big Sky country but also was alliterative with skies.

Bates’ rewriting clearly demonstrates the value of working over a lyric. The often-unsung third stanza, for example, originally read, “America! America! / God shed His grace on thee / Till selfish gain no longer stain / The banner of the free.” Clearly disillusioned by the excesses of the Gilded Age, Bates, a progressive intellectual, decided to denigrate the profit motive. On revising, Bates modified the stanza to read “America! America! / May God thy gold refine / Till all success be nobleness / And every gain divine.”

Bates’ original last stanza was also a bit flat and dispiriting. “God shed His grace on thee/ Till nobler men keep once again / Thy whiter jubilee.” Bates substituted, “God shed His grace on thee / And crown thy good with brotherhood / From sea to shining sea.” A more uplifting ending, to be sure.

Poet Bates tried to choose words familiar to most late-eighteenth century readers. Inspired by the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, she spoke of “alabaster cities.” Inspired by Kansas’s wheat fields, she wrote of “amber waves of grain.” And her splendid moments atop Pike’s Peak inspired “spacious skies,” “purple mountain majesties,” and “above the fruited plain.”

Of course, many of us consider the late Ray Charles’s version of “America the Beautiful” the most musically stunning rendition. Interestingly, Ray Charles began his most widely recognized recording, not with the usual first stanza lyrics (“spacious skies, amber waves of grain”), but with the darker fifth stanza which reads “O beautiful for heroes proved / In liberating strife / Who more than self their country loved / And mercy more than life.” Charles elected to focus on the sacrifices necessary to preserve the “sweet America” he loved so much.

Bates poem, turned unofficial anthem, has captured the hearts of countless Americans. We should be thankful for her inspired effort because “America the Beautiful” conveys an attitude of appreciation and gratitude for our nation’s extraordinary physical beauty and abundance, without triumphalism. And that’s beautiful!

Reach columnist Robert Brake at oobear@centurytel.net