America the Beautiful and Katharine Lee Bates

The words of "America the Beautiful" were written by Katharine Lee Bates after a trip from Massachusetts to Colorado and up to the top of Pike's Peak. This is the story of how they were written and how they became so popular. It's a holiday bonus episode to celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States of America.

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The music in the episode is all recorded by me. The melodies are in the public domain, as is Katharine's text.

The featured image is the view from Pike's Peak, by John Fowler from Placitas, NM, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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