A Favorite Song

"Independence Day" by Martina McBride is one of my favorite country songs of all time. Lyrics are below, but it really takes McBride's powerful voice and the slide of the steel guitar to make it work:

Well she seemed all right by dawn's early light
Though she looked a little worried and weak
She tried to pretend he wasn't drinkin' again
But daddy left the proof on her cheek
And I was only eight years old that summer
And I always seemed to be in the way
So I took myself down to the fair in town
On Independence Day

Well word gets a round in a small, small town
They said he was a dangerous man
Mama was proud and she stood her ground
But she knew she was on the losin' end
Some folks whispered and some folks talked
But everybody looked the other way
And when time ran out there was no one about
On Independence Day

Let Freedom ring, let the white dove sing
Let the whole world know that today is a
Day of reckoning
Let the weak be strong, let the right be wrong
Roll the stone away, Let the guilty pay, It's
Independence Day

Well she lit up the sky that fourth of July
By the time that the firemen come
They just put out the flames
And took down some names
And send me to the county home
Now I ain't sayin' it's right or it's wrong
But maybe it's the only way
Talk about your revolution
It's Independence Day

Let Freedom ring, let the white dove sing
Let the whole world know that today is a
Day of reckoning
Let the weak be strong, let the right be wrong
Roll the stone away, Let the guilty pay, It's
Independence Day

Roll the stone away
It's Independence Day


McBride makes a point about domestic violence with this song. (FYI: October is domestic violence awareness month. 1.5 million women are raped or assaulted by an intimate partner annually in the United States) This song makes me want to scream and yell and cry and beat down the doors of all this hidden misery. It makes me want to punch the man behind the counter at the mini-mart for looking at me with his greasy eyes. It makes me want to gather my girlfriends around me and build an impenetrable, amazonian fortress.

This song especially reminds of a women I met in high school. A friend and I drove down to a little nowhere town in North Dakota to visit her and her daughter. Her husband was out of town, but we sat in the garage because that was her space. She sucked cigarettes and rocked herself in her rocking chair, clutching her pregnent belly. Over the course of the evening she unfolded her life story to me. Sexual abuse by her father, grandfather and uncles as a kid. Then a teenage pregnancy and her first husband, who she later shot and killed in self defense. Now she was married to the sherrif in town, and she said it was much better. But still he comes home and beats and rapes her, despite her being 6 months pregnant. I can't shake the words she used, the apathetic tone in her voice, "When it's real bad, he pounds my head on the cement, sometimes . . . I just pretend I'm dead so he'll stop."

Nothing makes me angrier. Nothing.