We Americans
Updated: Aug 8
I first encountered We Americans: A Music Journey with Burl Ives in a $2 bin at the record store, which I instantly snapped up because, well, who doesn't want to hear Burl Ives sing folk classics like "Oh! Susannah," "Get Along Little Dogies" and "On Top Of Old Smoky"? Released by the National Geographic Society in celebration of the 1976 Bicentennial, the record is a treat, but gave no clue as to the existence of a companion book. As it turns out, I was in Indianapolis visiting family soon after and found myself (as I always do if at all possible) at Christys on the Southside for their weekly auction. And what should I find there lying on a table in the book section (of course you already know)? That's right, We Americans. My winning bid: ten dollars.
Nearly the dimensions of an LP, numbering 450 pages and weighing in at an enormous 7.6 pounds, We Americans was most certainly designed as a coffee table book to be casually digested rather than read straight through. I, of course, read it straight through, but in two sessions interrupted by a nearly 2.5 year break during which, in addition to maintaining a full-time job, I opened a winery (with some partners, of course).
Despite it's massive size, We Americans is not your typical school history text, and is all the more interesting for it. Generously loaded with photographs, paintings, illustrations and other ephemera, it's wondrous to look at and works as a sort of Museum of American History. The text, while mostly academic in tone (not surprising given the long list of professors from Duke, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Vassar, Brown and more who contributed chapters), is a casual, easy read, and each chapter successfully captures the American experience and the "spirit of the age."
As historical chapters give way to more current thematic topics (cars, leisure, movies, television, technology, etc.) near the end, We Americans loses some of its steam—and its charm. The authors of these chapters come across as old fuddy-duddies yearning for the way things were. In his chapter "Gone To The Movies," film critic Richard Schickel laments, "But most new movies 'interest' us without really involving us—or without making us feel sanguine as we warily approach the box office the next time we decide to take a flyer on a film."
That may be so for Mr. Schickel, and for the Bicentennial audience this book was designed to reach, and for me, too, had I discovered this book as a youth in the late '70s. Still, the first 300-plus pages are a treat, and despite some minor complaints with the final quarter, We Americans is a worthy and interesting read, a time capsule of history as it was seen more than four decades ago.
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