45th Annual "A Capitol Fourth" 4th of July Concert Celebrates American Music Legends The Beach Boys, The Temptations

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night PBS telecast the 45th annual A Capitol Fourth concert from the Capitol Mall at Washington, D.C., and it was actually more fun than usual. The show started with Lauren Daigle, one of the better “baby divas” cluttering up the modern music scene, singing “America, the Beautiful” and Yolanda Adams churning out a powerful version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then there was a four-song set by The Temptations, the current lineup with one surviving member (Otis Williams) from the original group. Williams, at least according to Wikipedia, owns the name “The Temptations,” and the rest of them are whoever he says they are. The songs they played last night were “Get Ready” and “My Girl,” and the current lead singer on “My Girl” (probably Tony Grant) is a quite good soul belter but doesn’t have the plaintive, understated quality the late David Ruffin brought to the original recording in 1964. Then the concert brought on Trombone Shorty (true name: Troy Andrews) from New Orleans, who played an engaging medley of Professor Longhair’s “Go to the Mardi Gras” (a flop on Atlantic when they recorded it in 1949 but a major local hit for the tiny Ron Records label when Longhair, whose real name was Henry Roeland Byrd, re-recorded it in 1959 and it became the official theme song of New Orleans’s Mardi Gras celebrations), “When the Saints Go Marching In” (featuring a woman vocalist who really belted out the song and brought it back to its gospel roots), and Solomon Burke’s 1960’s soul hit “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” (also covered in the mid-1960’s by The Rolling Stones). Despite his sobriquet, Shorty doubled on trumpet on the latter two songs. (Well, at least it’s still a brass instrument, so he doesn’t have to make the wrenching change in embouchure – the shape of the lips while playing – that musicians like Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Carter, and Brad Gowans, who played both brass and reed instruments, did.) Afterwards Lauren Daigle returned for a song called “Walking on Sunshine” that turned out to be a cover of the 1980’s band Katrina and the Waves (a group whose name I appropriated for my Hurricane Katrina editorial in Zenger’s Newsmagazine) and Abi Carter, who won the most recent (2024) American Idol contest, sang a suitably inspirational song called “The Climb.”

Then Yolanda Adams returned with Patrick Lundy and his gospel choir, the Ministers of Music, sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” My husband Charles was predictably put out by the fact that the version they performed didn’t contain John Brown’s name (the song was originally titled “John Brown’s Body” and contained the words, “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in his grave/But his soul is marching on!”) but used Julia Ward Howe’s bowdlerized version that’s become the standard (“He” – meaning God – “hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword/But his truth is marching on!”). Afterwards they brought out country singer Josh Turner for a nice upbeat song called “Firecracker” (as in, “My girlfriend is a … ”) and then a quite beautiful song called “Unsung Hero” dedicated to Turner’s grandfather, who fought in World War II. While he’s pushing it a bit with that title – how can he call his granddad an “unsung hero” when he’s singing about him? – I loved “Unsung Hero” because it was a respite from the high-energy material that had dominated the concert to that point. I also give Turner major points for including a country-style fiddle and a pedal steel guitar in his band; most so-called “country” bands today omit these once paradigmatic instruments and achieve a sound more like the 1970’s “Southern rock” bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers than hard-core country. Afterwards Jack Everly and the National Philharmonic Orchestra, who provided instrumental backing for the acts that needed it, played a medley of the Armed Forces’ theme songs, in the following sequence: Coast Guard, Space Force (who knew the “Space Force,” a rump creation of Donald Trump in his first term as President, had a theme song?), Air Force, Navy, Marines, and Army. Following that they paid a tribute to first responders – firefighters, paramedics, emergency medical technicians (EMT’s), and health care workers in general – via a song by Lauren Daigle called “Rescue.” After that a country duo called Locash (Chris Lucas and Preston Brust) did a song called “Three Favorite Colors.” Predictably for the occasion, their three favorite colors turned out to be red, white, and blue.

After that came another famous singing group led by the sole survivor among the original founding members – or at least among the relatives who started the band. It was The Beach Boys, led by Mike Love, who owns the rights to the band’s name and has led various rump editions for the last three decades or so. (Another original member, Al Jardine, is still alive and had planned a tour with Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson before Brian’s recent death; he went ahead with the tour in Brian’s memory.) I remembered a previous appearance by The Beach Boys on A Capitol Fourth in 2018 (ironically, that show also featured The Temptations!), and on this occasion they played four songs, all but one of them (“Wouldn’t It Be Nice?,” the opening track from their 1966 concept album Pet Sounds), from the early surf-cars-fun phase: “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “Help Me, Rhonda” (I remember having a friend named Rhonda who had grim memories of her adolescence because she got relentlessly teased for having the same first name as the girl in The Beach Boys’ song), and “Fun, Fun, Fun.” The long-awaited fireworks began over the ending of “Fun, Fun, Fun” (as they had in 2018 as well) and continued as usual through the remaining musical selections. These started with the last four minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (once again I savored the irony of celebrating American independence with a piece composed to commemorate the authoritarian regime of Tsarist Russia successfully defending itself against the at least nominally more liberal rule of Napoleon’s France) complete with cannons and a chorus belting out the Tsarist National Anthem when Tchaikovsky quoted it in the score.

They continued with the U.S. Servicemembers’ Chorus doing an O.K. patriotic song called “Let Freedom Ring”; the U.S. Army Band doing “The Caisson Song” (I remain irritated by the change in the words from “The caissons go rolling along” to “The Army goes rolling along,” though I understand why they’ve done it: who the hell knows what a caisson – a little wagon used to transport artillery balls to the front line – was anymore?) and George M. Cohan’s “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag”; Yolanda Adams belting out “God Bless America”; and the obligatory closer, John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” It was a fun evening and refreshingly free from most of the patriotic breast-beating that usually accompanies these events (instead there were two segments of modern-day servicemembers giving brief explanations of why they serve), though to say the least in the first year of the Second Coming of Führer Trump our relationship with the United States of America and the history of its founding is more jaundiced than ever. Earlier in the evening I had played the first disc of the 11-CD Mosaic Records boxed set of V-Discs (special records made by the U.S. military for distribution to servicemembers abroad, since from 1942 to 1944 the American Federation of Musicians called a strike against the recording industry and therefore the professional recording of music virtually ceased) and called it a reminder of the time when the U.S. was actually fighting fascism instead of embracing it.