Happy President’s Day to all of you out there! I hope you have the day off like I do today. Yes, thanks to some of our great American presidents (particularly two really important ones who were born in February) most of us have a much needed day off in the middle of winter. What should we do with the extra time? I think many of you music fans will take advantage of the opportunity to make some good music today and in doing so, you will be honoring many of our past presidents who did exactly the same thing.
Let’s start with George Washington. Not much is mentioned in the historical record about our founding father’s musicianship but I’ll bet he was a picker. He certainly had an appreciation of old time music. His favorite fiddle tune was Jaybird Sittin’ on a Hickory Limb. The next president, John Adams probably played some too but his son, John Quincy, was a very good flutist who also played the violin and harp.
Thomas Jefferson is the first president for whom there is solid documentation that he was a good musician. By age 14 he was writing down fiddle tunes he had learned. His favorite was Grey Eagle. He may have been the owner of an Amati violin, which would be worth a fortune today, and he purchased a Tourte bow while in Paris which had a then revolutionary (and we all know Jefferson was a revolutionary) bow design, now standard today. He also played the cello. Although Jefferson liked fiddle tunes like Grey Eagle, he was particularly fond of playing classic compositions by composers like Corelli, Vivaldi and Handel as well as contemporary works by composers such as Campioni and Haydn (I guess you could say he was in the big tent camp among the jammers of the day).
Fortunately for America, Jefferson fractured his wrist in 1786 while in France and went from practicing three hours every day at the fiddle to doing a lot of other things that proved to be much more important. But his brother Randolph carried on the fiddling tradition. Isaac, a family slave, once commented: “Randolph used to come out among the black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night”.
Our tenth president, John Tyler, was also a fiddle player. His favorite tune was Washington’s Grand March. After his time as president he spent a great deal of time playing music. His wife played guitar and sometimes they would recruit some of their fifteen kids to fill in at music parties.
Honest Abe Lincoln was a violin player. I’ll bet he would have loved Jay Ungar’s theme tune for Ken Burns’s Civil War movie, Ashokan Farewell. Two presidents played harmonica (Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan). And believe it or not, the presidential musician ranks even include a banjo picker, Chester A. Arthur. If you don’t believe me I’ll show you a photo of him posing with his banjo. Too bad he never got the chance to play on the Grand Old Opry, which started many years later.
One of our presidents did play on the Grand Old Opry though. He also had played his own piano composition on the Tonight show ten years before. His name was Richard Nixon and he was pretty good at the piano to tell the truth. Nixon also played the accordion and violin. A few months after playing “God Bless America” for the Nashville crowd he became our only president to resign from office.
Nixon was part of a Republican ticket that replaced another good piano playing president. Harry Truman got up at 5 am every day to practice piano for two hours before running the country.
Warren Harding may have been the president most inclined to play music but he probably wouldn’t have been a bluegrass picker. He was more focused on concert band instruments and he even joined the band that celebrated his nomination in 1920. He once remarked, “I played every instrument but the slide trombone and the E-flat cornet.” And speaking of band instruments, who can forget president Bill Clinton ripping up Elvis’s “Heartbreak Hotel” on the saxophone for the Arsenio Hall Show?
Even our current president has some musical chops. Barack Obama has been known to sing a few lines from time to time. So far it’s been stuff like “Let’s Stay Together” or “Sweet Home Chicago”. We can only guess how much soul he might put into a song like “The Old Crossroads”.
Happy President’s Day everyone!
