Who is credited with writing the lyrics to “America The Beautiful”?
The words to the song “America the Beautiful” were written by Katharine Lee Bates and the music was composed by Samuel A. Ward. Katharine Lee Bates was an English professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. In 1893, when she was 33 years old, Bates took a train trip to Colorado to teach for the summer. She was apparently inspired by the sights she saw along the way, such as the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (“thine alabaster cities gleam”), the Midwestern wheat fields (“amber fields of grain”) and the beautiful view from Pikes Peak (“purple mountain majesties”). She wrote a poem titled “Pikes Peak,” and it was first published in a weekly journal called The Congregationalist on July 4, 1895, with the title changed to “America.” At that time, it was not sung to any particular tune. She revised the words twice (in 1904 and again in 1913).
