Gene Scott Books, Essays, and Original Music!
Jubilant Feet
The country out the windshield ain't the country on the screen
Just returned from a 6,000-mile motorcycle ride — Johnson City, Tennessee to Klamath Falls, Oregon and back. Wanted to blog it all, but the relentless pace killed the idea.
So I’ll share the overall experience after a few days of reflection.
Your travel prayers made all the difference. Eric Middlemas and I rode inside a safe weather pocket the whole way, caught a little rain, but mostly spectacular skies and good roads under the wheels.
Here’s what we noticed, one end of the country to the other: people are friendly. They get along. They work together. A man at a gas pump in Nebraska will spend ten minutes telling you about his girl on the rifle team. A cowboy in a diner in the high desert waves you over to the good table. From the Blue Ridge to the redwoods, Americans like each other and help each other and want the same handful of things.
Not 100%.
But it’s the standard, and it feels pretty good.
Which is the exact opposite of the daily feed.
Ask the soccer players visiting our nation for the first time.
They know the average American is a friendly, open-minded, live-and-let-live individual who’s aware the whole country was built on the backs of immigrants — our ancestors. Whether they came from Scotland, the Amazon, or Zimbabwe.
Not 100% of Americans feel that way.
But the ones who don’t are usually too deep in the extreme rural pockets to have travelled much, or to have ever met a living human from a distant land.
Folks too bent on believing a barking Fox.
Open your phone and it’s hate, division, distortion, outrage on a timer. They’re eating your cats!
In reality, they’re wiping your nasty white backside in the nursing home and sending the money home to families who are starving.
Now that USAID is dead, so are hundreds of thousands of humans. The models say millions before it’s done.
A republic’s feet don’t stop at the county line.
Some walk a long way from home — into a clinic in Kenya, a feeding tent in South Sudan. Those were our feet too, and this year we pulled them back.
A study in The Lancet found that USAID prevented an estimated 91 million deaths over two decades, and projected that dismantling it could cost more than 14 million lives by 2030, over 4.5 million of them children under five.
The same thing is true across an ocean as across a street: somebody has to be willing to go.
When we stop going, people don’t get an argument.
They get a funeral.
None of the hateful political rhetoric spewing from the tiny oval in the Oval Office matches what I saw out a windshield at seventy miles an hour three weeks straight.
The country I rode through and the one I’m shown on a screen are not the same country.
One of them is real.
The other is engineered to keep me scared and sitting still.
That gap is what got me writing.
Never thought I’d write a Fourth of July song.
Patriotic music mostly leaves me cold — too many flags, too much borrowed thunder, songs that sound like they’re saluting something instead of loving it.
But this month’s Atlantic ran a picture of Julia Ward Howe’s lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and I sat on the couch reading over words that struck me fresh. One verse stopped me cold.
From “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” by Julia Ward Howe (1862)He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat: Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet! Our God is marching on.
There it was, buried in the thunder — be jubilant, my feet.
The rest of the hymn is sword and vintage and judgment: the fateful lightning, the terrible swift sword, God marching in from above to sort out who’s right. Grand. And I understand why Howe wrote it that way in 1862; the country was tearing itself in half and she reached for the biggest weapon language had.
But three lines into that fourth verse, she set the thunder down and wrote something small and human. Not the Lord’s feet. Hers.
Be jubilant, my feet.
The command to answer doesn’t come down from heaven — it lands in a body, in a pair of feet that have to actually go somewhere.
So I stole it. That one line.
And built a whole song around it.
Because fresh off six thousand miles of ordinary people being decent to each other for no particular reason, I knew: that’s not the republic I just rode through. Nobody out there was waiting on lightning from the sky.
The republic I saw ran on legs — on people getting up, going outside, and doing the small, unglamorous work of being a neighbor. It doesn’t march down from heaven. It walks, or it doesn’t move at all.
So I wrote the opposite of a battle hymn.
No swords, no glory, no vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
I wanted a song that started as small as the thing starts: a chair, a screen, a pair of shoes by the door. A man in a basement who knows every danger in the world and hasn’t crossed his own sidewalk.
Then let the country physically enter the song one doorstep at a time.
Because here’s the whole idea, and it’s simpler than Howe’s and I think truer:
A republic can’t walk without human legs. It has no feet but ours.
I called it “Jubilant Feet.”
Here it is. I’ll say a word about it on the far side, but a song ought to be able to walk in the door on its own two feet before its writer starts explaining it. So — read it, or better, hum it.
It moves at 116 beats a minute, about the pace of a determined walk. That’s not an accident.
JUBILANT FEET
Verse 1
I was down where the daylight Couldn’t get through Watching the whole world happen From a basement room I could name every danger I could tell you who’s to blame But I hadn’t crossed the sidewalk Or asked my neighbor’s name
Pre-Chorus
Then somewhere through the window Came a laugh out in the street And I stood in the doorway Still in my stocking feet
Chorus
Shoes on the floor Key in the door Cross that street Knock once more Learn one name Pull up a seat The republic has no feet but ours— Come on, jubilant feet
Verse 2
I started with the old man Who lives at twenty-three He said, “Son, we won’t agree much” I said, “That’s all right with me” Then the woman at the market Poured us coffee to the brim Then the kid behind the till Came out and laughed with him
Pre-Chorus
Funny, I thought the street was sleeping While I worried there alone Turns out everybody waited For somebody else to go
Chorus
Shoes on the floor Key in the door Cross that street Knock once more Learn one name Pull up a seat The republic has no feet but ours— Come on, jubilant feet
Verse 3
There’s a chair beside the furnace Where I used to watch the news There’s a hollow in the cushion Shaped just like my blues I knew every red-faced stranger Shouting underneath a light But not who kept the porch lamp burning Three doors down from me at night
Pre-Chorus
Now somebody calls from the driveway Someone waves across the street And the block I thought was sleeping Has been waiting on its feet
Bridge
One pair on the sidewalk Two pairs at the gate Ten coming round the corner Saying, “It’s not too late” A hundred in the morning A thousand by the week You can hear a country coming Before you hear it speak
Break / March Chant
Take your key Leave your chair Down the steps Into the air Past your gate Onto the street The road is waiting— Bring your feet
Final Chorus
Shoes on the floor Key in the door Cross that street Knock once more Learn one name Save one seat The republic has no feet but ours— Come on, jubilant feetShoes on the floor Doors open wide Call down the block “Anybody outside?” Here comes a laugh Here comes the beat Here comes the whole damn neighborhood On jubilant feet
Outro
Shoes on Door wide Daylight OutsideShoes on Door wide Come on— Come outside
So this Fourth of July, that’s the only thing I’m asking.
Not lightning. Not glory. Shoes on. Key in the door. There’s a name three doors down you don’t know yet.
Come on, jubilant feet!
Gene Scott grew up on a tenant farm outside Sheffield, Illinois, surrounded by hogs, motorcycles, storytelling, and the hard realities of Midwestern working life. A lifelong reader, songwriter, photographer, and novelist, Scott writes fiction rooted in working-class America, Appalachian culture, memory, faith, loss, endurance, and the strange beauty hidden inside ordinary lives.
