I was 11 years old when I first heard “God Bless America.” Now, to me, this was a very strange Irving Berlin song because I knew my father as this jazzy, sophisticated or earthy vernacular writer of songs like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” and “Cheek to Cheek.” And then it began creeping up on me. I came to understand that it wasn’t “God bless America, land that we love.” It was “God bless America, land that I love.” It was an incredibly personal statement that my father was making, that anybody singing that song makes as they sing it. And I understood that that song was his thank you to the country that had taken him in. It was the song of the immigrant boy who’d made good.
