"O [insert birthplace here], My [insert birthplace here]!"

Sunday night, for reasons which are now obscure to me, I was joking around with the Old Man about state symbols. For instance, I told him that the State Rock of Missouri was something called "mozarkite" and asked him if he knew what it was for California, his home state. He said he didn't, although he thought it might be a botryoidal form of jade. I considered this for a moment and said, "I know! It must be yosemite!" (Actually, it's serpentine.)

Then I started teasing him about the State Song. "O Clementine"? "That's not about California!" he protested, prompting me to belt out:

In a cavern, in a canyon,
Excavating for a mine
Dwelt a miner forty niner,
And his daughter Clementine

I hummed "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" and he said, "That's not about California, it's about San Jose."

At which point I pointed out that there are essentially two kinds of compositions which get designated official state symbols: Well-loved songs associated with a state, which are likely to be rather more specific in their references (since the better songs of that era tend to tell stories, and it's unlikely you'll have a tale which just happens to namecheck all the important locations within a state) and songs commissioned especially for that purpose, which tend to be awful.

No prizes for guessing which of the two Illinois has. (Here's a link to the lyrics. Anyone who can get through more than a stanza without feeling the urge to vomit probably deserves some sort of prize.) monshu pointed out that a fair number probably consist of some shitty poem composed by a local greengrocer's wife which were later set to music. As it turns out, that's pretty much the story of California's selection.

My home state, by contrast, went the "well-loved" route, which brings with it its own problems, given how much sensibilities have changed in a century. Wikipedia describes the "Missouri Waltz" as "essentially ... a minstrel song" and the original version includes this noteworthy stanza:

Way down in Missouri where I heard this melody,
When I was a Pickaninny on ma Mammy's knee;
The darkies were hummin'; their banjos were strummin';
So sweet and low.

The bowdlerised version in current use (no date for when that happened, but I'm willing to bet it's mortifyingly recent) substitutes "Mommy" for "Mammy", "little child" for "pickaninny", and "old folks" for "darkies", but nobody's fooled--particularly with the words "Dixie" and "Dixieland" intact. No wonder I never once heard the song growing up, let alone learned to sing it.

Could be worse, of course: my birth state's song was written by a bonafide Confederate, leading to such choice lines as "Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!" (sung to the tune of "O Tannebaum" for maximum cognitive dissonance). Colorado actually had a perfectly respectable tune in "Where the Columbines Grow", which I imagine became a little awkward after the effects of April 20, 1999; it's now co-official with John Denver's "Rocky Mountain High" and I don't think I have to guess which of those is more commonly performed.