Answer:
Why these songs? I believe we were told that the songs were to illustrate music around the world, or something like that. But my recollection is that they mostly bolstered a sense of America’s place in the world, with music from countries that had contributed significantly to American culture, like Germany and Italy; there were probably also English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish folksongs in there, and almost surely “Alouette”, representing Canada and France simultaneously, to go along with “Cielito Lindo” representing our neighbor Mexico. “Aloha Oe”, for Hawaii, probably was in the book. In any case, “Zamboanga” stands out in my memory as being truly exotic, a song from a tropical island nation on the other side of the world. I don’t think anyone told us that until three or four years before we got our music books, the Philippines had been under U.S. administration — from 1898 until 1946 — and that independence from the American yoke had not come easily.
Explanation:
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