The Great Composer Quiz – July 19, 2020
This time, it’s a Quiz about a hit maker. This Great Composer wrote a work which is, or deserves be, considered America’s greatness national song, and was first recorded on this date, July 19, sometime in our collective national heritage. The work has been covered over 60,000 times by artists as varied as Metropolitan Opera lyric soprano Helen Jepson and Janis Joplin who recorded it with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Among the great and debatable interpretations are records by Willie Nelson, Ethel Ennis, Frank Sinatra, Brian Wilson, Aaron Neville, Annie Lennox, Lawrence Welk, Peter Gabriel and Barry Manilow (not together), Fitzgerald & Armstrong (together and separately) Sonny & Cher and Joe & Eddie and Sam & Dave and Jim Hall & Pat Metheny and Dickie Loader & The Blue Jeans, Paul Revere and The Raiders, Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, The King’s Singers, The Swingle Singers, The Doors, The Front Porch String Band, Mahalia Jackson, Jean-Pierre Rampal, R.E.M., Kiri Te Kanawa, Cab Calloway, Olivia Newton-John, Charlotte Church, The Four Freshmen, The Righteous Brothers and the righteous Billy Stewart who strutted this work to its brassy high water mark #10 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Really?! America’s greatest national song has never stood at #1? What is it? Who wrote it, this Great Composer?