Weird. But then we sing about being soldiers of destiny.

Well I am sure there are all sorts of historical references that have escaped me. The some had slaves verse immediately struck me as a celebration of gay marriage. Was this the intent?

nope, that reference passed me by. But words and meanings change over time. I liked the forward looking bit about teaching your children the lessons learned.

Yes, some had slaves,
And most made war,
And all did things
We have regretted evermore,
But we came through,
And born anew,
We've made Virginia now for lovers of all hue.

While owning slaves we learnt the truth
That God made all men free
In fighting war we came to know
That peace brings liberty
Our children's children we will teach
this wisdom from above
To put aside the bonds of hate,
Virginians! live in love.

Wrong metre, I know.

The most fundamental problem: a state song, to be credible, needs to have already been embraced by its people as speaking to their identity. It's not something one composes with the intention to get it so embraced.

Virginia had a state song for generations. For worthy reasons, it retired the song. But your task of Sisyphus is that Stephen Foster is the founder of American popular song, and you struggle, I think in vain, against that powerful cultural ghost.

Shenandoah is a hauntingly lovely popular song, but even it has not managed to break through.

My own best suggestion: it's better for Virginia not to have a new state song. Besides, Virginia is so schizoid culturally now that I don't think it can embrace a new one, given how much of the state has become dependent on the political-national security-industrial complex over the last 35 years or so.

* * *

On a more technical level, your text suffers from equivocation about the audience. Is it being addressed to anyone? It sounds like one is singing *about* Virginia, but not *to* or *with* anyone in particular.

Speaking of Foster's My Old Kentucky Home: when I visited Canterbury Cathedral in 1989, I attended midday prayers. As it turned out, it happened that the Eastern Kentucky University choir was invited to sing the service. After the service ended, they sang My Old Kentucky Home, quietly. It sounded so bittersweet in that acoustical space....

The slavery thing has been greatly over-done. Nearly all civilizations had them until machinery developed to the point they became impractical, inefficient, or no longer cost effective. Give it a rest. With relatives from Richmond and some in neighboring West Virginia, that area has changed so much in the last 20 years it would no longer be recognizable to the earlier inhabitants. Probably also true for much of the country.

In Tennessee we have what I consider a dreadful state song. However, the population has largely adopted and endorsed it so it stays. Our legislature - the best money can buy - also has adopted it as official. What can you do? LOL.

So what's the CA state song? Moonbeam over Sacramento? LOL.

That one is actually a pretty good song. As for the "Moonbeam" it seemed to me he did a good job of "mooning" the state - more than once. LOL.

CharlesW, I live in one of the THE most rural, least changed areas in Virginia. And the confederate flag is part of the landscape. As a native Virginian myself, I understand the good half of the mixed message, we stood up for what we stood up for, but as an ex-cosmopolitan I definitely feel the bad two-thirds outweigh the good half of that particular usage.

James Bland is really a very good composer, it's too bad that so many of his songs (their lyrics) pandered to the expectation of his audience at the time. And of course O Shenandoah is a good song, just that it's not about the Shenandoah valley, nor for that matter is most of Virginia about the Shenandoah valley.

mrcopper

musically speaking:

not sure you want the tune, 'my dog has fleas' for the phrase "and most made war" and the phrase soon after... and... I wouldn't go as high as an E... you are repeating the bane of the star spangled banner... too wide a spread in the tessitura of the common people.

in general when writing a melody for a non musical audience to sing, I would use larger intervals at the beginning of a phrase and make them shorter as I progressed (or at least keep them all within the triad [arpeggio]), so ending on a D instead of the E.