![]() ![]() Corn says, “it was something that you displayed in public.” It was not long before people started understanding the difference between one kind of car and another. They were something most people could see themselves affording one day. Why? Well, not everyone could hope to own an airplane or a ship and if people owned phones or a record players, they kept them inside the house. Of all these new inventions, it was the car that songwriters latched onto. The skyscrapers, ships, also, automobiles to show their appreciation and expectations for technology that way.” There were all these new inventions like record players, airplanes, telephones and of course cars, and now he says people started painting and singing about that. Corn says, that started to change and “technology was very much something that Americans were starting to worship.” In painting, he says, “We didn't have the ancient monuments but what we did have was fabulous scenery - we had the Rocky Mountains, we had the vast prairies, we had Great Lakes,” and for a long time that’s what American artists – painters and songwriters – concentrated on, until the 20 th century arrived. Doctor Corn says you can see this in the art that people made in the 1800s. The way they saw it, we didn’t have ancient history, and it was history that made a country great. For a long time, people in Europe had seen the US as a second-rate country. The early 1900s were important for America. The gas burned out in the big machine,” the song said, “but the darned little Ford don’t need gasoline” (in fact, many of the original Ford cars were electric). ![]() In 1915, a singer named Billy Murray sang about a “little old Ford” that “rambled right along. There have been songs about cars in the United States for as long as there’ve been cars. The car, the road, represents new possibilities, represent freedom.” Corn points out, “We have this cultural fascination with leaving, with hitting the road. There is song after song about Chevrolets – not just Ridin' in My Chevy by Snoop Dogg but also Tim McGraw, where Taylor Swift sings about “a boy in a Chevy truck,” So What Cha Want?, where the Beastie Boys say “You scream and you holler about my Chevy Impala,” and the oldie American Pie by Don McLean who “Drove my Chevy to the levee.”Īnd those only scratch the surface. As Joe Corn, professor emeritus of History at Stanford University says, “We have just dozens of them - hundreds of them.” There are songs about Thunderbirds, like Little Deuce Coupe and Fun, Fun, Fun by the Beach Boys. We write songs about desire, songs about loneliness, about heartbreak, love, and for some reason, we also write lots and lots of songs about cars. People write songs about a lot of things, mostly things that mean a lot to us. ![]()
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