“I have mixed feelings about it, to be honest,” says McBride, who with songwriter Gretchen Peters, look back at “Independence Day” 25 years later
Martina McBride performed "Independence Day" at the 2001 Farm Aid, a few weeks after the September 11th terrorist attacks.’s “Independence Day” was released to country radio in April 1994, it was easy to mistake the country song for a U-S-A! U-S-A! anthem. It was titled after America’s most patriotic holiday after all, and its irresistible chorus of “Let freedom ring!” seemed custom-made for small-town Fourth of July celebrations to come.
“It was not cool to be a country music fan at the time, at all,” she says, laughing. “I would go in there…it was kind of like going to see my dealer, you know? He’d slip me a few George Jones records and say, ‘Go listen to this, kid.’” In “Independence Day,” the daughter discovers the fire when she returns from the Fourth of July parade, and is quickly whisked away “to the county home.” We never find out if the mother survived or not. It was that potent mixture of violence and ambiguity that made Peters, as a “relatively young and hungry” songwriter, nervous that no one would even want the song. But in the end, the desire to tell the truth, and not to project a false sense of hope, won over.
“What drew me to it was the brilliance of the lyrics,” says McBride. “If you write it down on paper, it’s like a work of literature, it’s like a poem.” “It was interesting because we received initial pushback on the song, and I was so confused by that,” says McBride. “I was like, ‘Why wouldn’t they play this song?; My record promotion people came to me and said, ‘It probably isn’t going to work, there’s a lot of radio stations that just aren’t going to play it.’”
“They were like, ‘I don’t think this needs to be on my radio station. I don’t think people need to be hearing this,’” she recalls. “And I’m like, ‘Well, it’s on your news every hour. This is topical.’ And then I had one music director who said, ‘You know, if that [music] video is on, and my young daughter walks through the room, I have to have a discussion with her and explain it to her.
“That happened in the middle of that song’s life as a single, and the fan reaction was so strong that some radio stations just reversed position on it because suddenly, ‘Oh, well this is timely,’” says Peters. “I can’t even begin to understand the mental gyrations.”by the song’s overall story, they were at least moved by its chorus.
Her Farm Aid performance three years later carries a different tone. Just two weeks after September 11th, McBride stands on stage in a white tank top and sparkling boot-cut jeans, her chestnut hair down past her shoulders, flanked by two giant waving American flag cut-outs. Audience members jump out of their seats to wave flags, hold up larger flags, and hold up jean jackets with flag patches ironed on the back.
“When the Sean Hannity thing happened, it didn’t feel so benign to me,” Peters says. “It felt like they were twisting the song. And I used to think that it was just a matter of somebody didn’t listen to the song, they just listened to the chorus. That was my take on it then. My take on it in more recent years is that they don’t care.”
For her part, McBride has made issues of domestic violence and advocacy work a core tenet of her career. She’s been a spokesperson for the National Domestic Violence Hotline and worked with the National Teen Dating Abuse Hotline, and hosted a variety of charity initiatives for various other causes such as Kids Wish Network.
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