WE ARE THE WORLD: Telling America’s story one song at a time, by Karl Stoltz
Shakespeare wrote, “If music be the food of love, play on.” When it comes to public diplomacy, getting the people of other countries to love us more is always easier when we feed them with music than with words.I have many memories of my 39-year diplomatic career, but many of my fondest come from the times when I was able to bring the rich diversity of American culture to the awareness of overseas audiences through music.
I am not a gifted songwriter, singer, dancer, or instrumentalist myself; those who have heard me sing or witnessed me try to move can attest to that. But I am a nerd about U.S. musical history (a “merd”?). I truly feel that melting pots like the United States of America are able to sift together extra ingredients and come up with art forms that go on to influence the world: the blues, ragtime, jazz, swing, country-western, rock-n-roll, hip-hop, and more, to cite just a few first forged in America’s cauldron.
Likewise, “We are the World” is more than a song title. Every American can trace his or her lineage to other countries and cultures, and usually to a blend of many. Our musical heritage is as diverse as our DNA, and it makes us unique.
Everywhere I have served, from Washington to Wellington and from Kuala Lumpur to Copenhagen, I have found a way to speak about the History of American Rock and Roll, with accompanying song clips and slides. I use the history of that music to delve into other topics, such as how the power of music helped empower youth, overcome segregation, and unite people at times of crisis. Rock and roll was my soundtrack for a deep, candid look back at our last 75 years, and how much had changed in that era.
I have delivered that stock speech in South African townships, in Indonesian madrasas, at Danish universities, in Papua New Guinean villages, in Russian libraries, and in American Centers on four continents. I update it every time, to cover changing tastes and new stars, but my core message is the always same – just as blending different instruments and voices together makes the best music, blending people of different religions, races, and ethnic backgrounds together makes better nations.
Sharing my love of American music with global audiences is a privilege. I have had the chance to see our music connect skeptical audiences with shared experiences and share emotions in ways that no words can:
- In Gore, New Zealand, I watched an American country singer (Steve Young, who wrote “Seven Bridges Road” for the Eagles and “Lonesome, Orn’ry, and Mean” for Waylon Jennings) encounter an audience in the nation’s “County Music Capital,” only to discover onstage that the locals preferred 1950’s style Grand Ole Opry yodeling to the outlaw blues in his repertoire. We huddled and, a la the Blues Brothers at a biker bar, Steve raided his memory for some Elvis songs that won over the audience.
- In Moscow, Russia, I helped promote an old-time 1960s rock-n-roll band (Beatles and Beach Boys) to a large Russian audience just months after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Everyone was dancing in the aisles until intermission, when I learned to my great embarrassment at the time that the band’s name (“the Convertibles”) referred not to the open-roof cars, but to their real purpose in visiting post-Communist Russia: to handing out Bibles and try to entice the audience to follow their faith, along with their tunes.
- In Papua New Guinea, I brought Red Steagall and the Coleman County Cowboys from Texas to ride the range in the Eastern Highlands. With portable generators whirring nearby, we discovered that Texas swing can win fans everywhere, including in places where the first encounter between local tribes and the West had only occurred 50 years before.
- In Myanmar (Burma), I watched R&B and soul performer Maya Azucena and her band perform on a home-made stage outside the American Center in Rangoon, as Maya invited local artists to join her. There I discovered for the first time that it was possible to sing crowd-pleasing hip-hop songs in both Burmese and English.
- Also in Myanmar, on a last-minute stage built of water festival platforms, and in South Africa and Malaysia, I watched the Battery Dance Company connect local communities that had traditionally lived apart with one another through the power and unity of modern dance.
In the 1950s and 1960s, America used Jazz Ambassadors to pry open the Iron Curtain. Willis Conover’s music broadcasts on the Voice of America won him millions of followers overseas, even though few Americans knew his name. I was able to supervise a later iteration of our musical diplomacy in the mid-2010s as office director of the Cultural Programs Division of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. There, despite a paltry budget, we supported our overseas’ posts efforts in song, dance, film, and other arts. We started a world music project that brought musicians from multiple countries together to record incredible albums together. Every week, we filled the Millennium Stage of the late Kennedy Center with artists from around the world. We sent Muslim Americans to the Middle East to rap about Islam in America, and Native American musicians and dancers around the world to showcase their indigenous forms of creative expression.
When music talks, audiences listen. I wish we recognized this and invested much more in this magical public diplomacy tool than we do today. I am deeply grateful to the talented musicians and dancers who did not worry about our paltry per diem and tight budgets but volunteered their time anyway. They let us take them on wild trips to remote locations just to support our national interests. In addition to great photos, I think many of them gained a lot from the people they met abroad, and that it helped shape their future recordings.
I am now co-president of the Public Diplomacy Council of America (PDCA), an organization of Soft Power-lovers. As our country celebrated its 250th birthday this year, I was able to geek out by helping organize a summerlong online contest online to choose a favorite song from each U.S. state and territory, one that best captures that location’s history and ambiance, ideally by someone with hometown roots in that location.
The result is now available in a YouTube playlist with the 55 state-by-state winners. I encourage you to visit it, enjoy the music, and comment if you think we should expand the playlist to add essential songs that we missed.
The Danish storyteller Hans Christian Anderson once wrote, “Where words fail, music speaks.” Words have failed me often in my public diplomacy career, but music has always filled the gap. And always will.
Karl Stoltz is Co-President of PDCA.