The other night, my son said he wanted to see how many of the states he could name without looking. After rattling off about twenty, I asked him if he wanted to hear them all in under a minute, and proceeded to whip out a grade school classic “Fifty Nifty United States,” and impress him for what might be the last time over the next decade.
L.V. Anderson at Slate decided to go in search of the story behind the song that taught so many of us our states.
It turns out, Ray Charles (not that one) — who also sang the “Three’s Company” theme and wrote music for “The Muppet Show”) didn’t even know the song he wrote for “Perry Como’s Kraft Music Hall” had become an elementary school music class hit until ten years after it first appeared on TV in 1961.
So how did it make it into the schools?
During the mid-20th century, when choral groups like the Ray Charles Singers dominated the airwaves, music publishers realized that there was an untapped market for written arrangements of popular songs. School choirs had previously been limited to classical compositions, but choir directors jumped at the chance to teach their students more accessible, modern tunes. Whoever saw fit to print and distribute “Fifty Nifty United States” probably predicted—correctly—that music educators would embrace the catchy, wholesome, patriotic song.
How, exactly, the song caught on with educators is hard to say definitely, although some clues suggest how it spread. In the summer of 1963, the song was performed at the National Education Association’s annual meeting in Michigan, possibly serving as inspiration for the thousands of educators in attendance. In 1970, the national newsletter of American Legion Auxiliary, a popular women’s patriotic group that surely included many teachers, published the lyrics as the “suggested patriotic song for October.”…
We might never know the definitive answer, but those of us who learned it can’t forget the fifty states.
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