Two American Songs

Remember being on a long cross-country drive, family, and singing? In my time, we had a real repertoire and would go on thematic jags—all the songs you know focusing on a woman's name, or state names, which we'd try to do in alphabetical order, or animals. If people could do that today and I were leading a cycle of songs on American cities, I'd be bound to come up with these two wonderful works that keep popping up in my mind today, each a remarkable fusion of lyric and melody and iconic of the place it celebrates—the Randy Newman with its deep self-deprecating modesty and generosity, the Marty Robbins with its self-conscious biculturalism and the extraordinary combination of white-hot romanticism with cowboy deadpan.