“Of all nations,” wrote Walt Whitman, “the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest.”
This prediction in 1855—exactly 100 years before Little Richard recorded “Tutti Frutti”—turned out to be truer than Whitman could have dreamed. He probably didn’t anticipate, though, that the most powerful American poetry would come from its songwriters. With the creation of jazz, blues, gospel, and country music, and the synthesis of those forms into rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop, styles invented in the U.S. consistently shook up the world. As the nation approaches its 250th birthday, it is our music that best tells our story.
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