The House We Live In

Roy Ringwald was Fred Waring’s chief arranger for decades, and his settings are the sound of American community choirs from the 1940s through the 1970s: rich, singable, built like hymns. This one rises slowly to “I lift my lamp.” 

Ol’ Man River 

Show Boat (1927) · Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein II · arr. Hawley Ades 

Show Boat opened December 27, 1927 and is usually called the first modern American musical: a serious story, spanning decades, with songs that move it forward instead of interrupting it. “Ol’ Man River” belongs to Joe, a Black dockworker on the Mississippi, and it’s the spine of the show, returning as the years pass. 

Jules Bledsoe sang it first on Broadway. Paul Robeson, for whom the part was written, sang it in London in 1928 and in the 1936 film, and then kept singing it for 40 years, changing the words as he went. “I’m tired of livin’ and scared of dyin'” became “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.” A song about enduring became a song about resisting. 

Make Them Hear You 

Ragtime (1998) · Stephen Flaherty & Lynn Ahrens · arr. Jeff Funk 

Ragtime, adapted from E. L. Doctorow’s novel, opened in January 1998 and braids three families through the first years of the 20th century: one white and suburban, one Black and from Harlem, one Jewish and just off the boat. Coalhouse Walker Jr. is a ragtime pianist whose car is destroyed by a racist fire company. The law fails him. His fiancée is killed. He takes the Morgan Library hostage. 

“Make Them Hear You” is his last instruction to his followers before he surrenders: don’t avenge me, tell the story. Brian Stokes Mitchell sang it on Broadway and it became his signature. Jeff Funk’s arrangement was made from the original Broadway score. 

IV. Postcards from Home

Oklahoma! Medley 

Oklahoma! (1943) · Rodgers & Hammerstein · arr. Clay Warnick 

March 31, 1943. The first Rodgers and Hammerstein show opened with no chorus girls, no overture worth mentioning, just a cowboy offstage singing about corn. It ran five years and 2,212 performances and changed what a musical could be. Set in Indian Territory in 1906, the year before statehood, it has a box social, a dream ballet, and a farmer and a cowman who really ought to be friends. 

Ballgame 

“Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (1908) · Albert Von Tilzer & Jack Norworth · arr. Debra Morton 

Jack Norworth, a vaudeville performer, wrote the words on a subway ride in 1908 after spotting an advertisement for a game at the Polo Grounds. Albert Von Tilzer wrote the tune. By most accounts, neither man had ever been to a major-league game. Norworth reportedly attended his first in 1940. The verses nobody sings are about a baseball-mad young woman named Katie Casey who’d rather go to the ballpark than the theater. Our men will handle this one. 

There Is Nothin’ Like a Dame 

South Pacific (1949) · Rodgers & Hammerstein 

South Pacific opened in April 1949 with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, won the Pulitzer, and swept the Tonys. Adapted from James Michener’s wartime stories, it’s about two love affairs and the prejudice that nearly wrecks both. This number belongs to the Seabees: restless sailors stuck on an island with no women, led by the scheming Luther Billis, griping in close harmony. It was written for an audience that had just come home from the Pacific. 

A Wonderful Guy 

South Pacific (1949) · Rodgers & Hammerstein · arr. Mark Brymer 

The women answer. Nellie Forbush, a Navy nurse from Little Rock, has been trying not to fall for the French planter Emile de Becque. She fails, and this waltz is the sound of her giving up gladly. The story goes (Mary Martin told it herself) that she sang it with such abandon at one rehearsal that she fell off the piano bench, and Richard Rodgers told her that was exactly how he wanted it. 

Fifty Nifty United States 

Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall (1961) · Ray Charles 

Not that Ray Charles. This one was born Charles Raymond Offenberg in Chicago, led the Ray Charles Singers, ran the music on Perry Como’s television show for years, wrote “Letters, We Get Letters,” sang the theme to Three’s Company, and spent three decades as a consultant to the Kennedy Center Honors. 

On November 1, 1961, Como’s show launched a state-of-the-week feature with a 47-second theme song. That first version didn’t even list the states. Charles added the alphabetical roll call when a publisher asked to print it, and the longer version slowly became the thing every American fourth-grader learns. Como’s feature only made it through 25 states before the show ended. Charles said he didn’t find out until about 1998 that schools were singing it. All 50 states in under three minutes, and yes, we’ll be memorizing them. 

V. In Uniform

Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning 

Yip! Yip! Yaphank (1918) · Irving Berlin 

Irving Berlin was drafted in 1918 at age 30 and sent to Camp Upton at Yaphank, Long Island. He hated reveille. He talked his commanding officer into letting him write an all-soldier revue to raise money for the camp, and Yip! Yip! Yaphank played Broadway that August and September with a cast of some 300 servicemen. Sergeant Berlin sang this song himself, in uniform, dragged out of a tent by his bunkmates. He was not a good singer. That was the joke. He did the same bit again 24 years later in This Is the Army. 

He wrote another song for that 1918 show and cut it. He thought it was too solemn for a soldier revue. Hold that thought until the end of the concert. 

Tell My Father 

The Civil War (1999) · Frank Wildhorn & Jack Murphy · arr. Andrea Ramsey 

The parade stops a second time. Frank Wildhorn’s The Civil War opened at the St. James Theatre in April 1999. It has no plot, just voices from both sides, from enslaved people, from the home front, drawn from letters, diaries, and speeches of the period. “Tell My Father” is a young soldier’s dying message home: tell him I wore the blue, tell him I didn’t run, tell him I was brave. 

Andrea Ramsey’s setting for men’s voices uses a solo violin as a second voice alongside the singers. It’s the companion piece to “Momma, Look Sharp,” another boy writing home, 85 years later. 

VI. The House We Keep

Take Care of This House / My House 

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976) & Peter Pan (1950) · Leonard Bernstein · arr. Rob Fisher 

In 1976, Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner wrote a musical for America’s 200th birthday. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue told a hundred years of White House history through the presidents and first ladies upstairs and three generations of a Black servant family downstairs. It opened May 4 and closed May 8, after 7 performances. Clive Barnes in the New York Times suggested waiting for the Tricentennial. Bernstein and Lerner withdrew the show entirely. No cast album was ever made. It was Bernstein’s last Broadway score. 

One song survived. Abigail Adams sings “Take Care of This House” to a young servant boy as the Adamses move into the unfinished White House in 1800. Frederica von Stade sang it at Jimmy Carter’s inauguration the next January, with Bernstein conducting, and Julie Andrews, Marilyn Horne, and Kelli O’Hara have recorded it since. 

“My House” comes from a different Bernstein project: the 1950 Broadway Peter Pan with Jean Arthur as Peter and Boris Karloff as Captain Hook. Wendy sings it to the Lost Boys as they build her a little house in Neverland. Rob Fisher, founding conductor of New York City Center’s Encores! series, set the two songs side by side for chorus, piano, and cello. A child’s house and a nation’s house. That pairing gave this concert its name. 

The House I Live In 

Let Freedom Sing (1942) · Earl Robinson & Lewis Allan 

Let Freedom Sing was a small, earnest revue that opened October 5, 1942 and closed after 8 performances. That would have been the end of this song, except that in 1945 RKO made a 10-minute film in which Frank Sinatra breaks up a gang of boys chasing a Jewish kid, tells them one American’s blood is as good as another’s, and sings it. The film won an honorary Academy Award and sits on the National Film Registry. Sinatra sang the song for the rest of his life. 

The writers paid for their politics. Composer Earl Robinson was blacklisted in the 1950s. The lyricist, who published as Lewis Allan, was Abel Meeropol, a Bronx high-school English teacher who had already written “Strange Fruit” for Billie Holiday. He and his wife later adopted the two orphaned sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Same man, same question: who counts as an American? His answer was “all races and religions, that’s America to me.” 

VII. The Parade Goes On 

God Bless America (Festival Edition) 

Written 1918, revised 1938 · Irving Berlin · arr. Roy Ringwald 

Here’s the song from the drawer. Berlin wrote it at Camp Upton in 1918 for Yip! Yip! Yaphank and cut it before opening. Twenty years later, with war coming again in Europe, Kate Smith’s manager asked him for something patriotic for her Armistice Day broadcast. Berlin dug it out, revised a few lines, and Smith sang it on the radio on November 10, 1938. He signed over every penny of royalties, forever, to a trust benefiting the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America. 

Roy Ringwald’s Festival Edition ends with a verse built for the audience to stand and sing. They will. So will we. 

Bring a friend, bring a flag, bring your voice. Sunday, October 25, 2026, 3 PM

Reuter Center, UNC Asheville. Admission is free.