home of the free because of the brave song

It was a hippie protest anthem: “the school board says he can’t come to school no more, unless he wears his hair like he wore it before…” The lyrics didn’t sit well with some Americans in a country busy drafting soldiers for the Vietnam War. It became a top ten hit in Canada, but only peaked at #25 in the USA. Overlapping with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in America, Jody Miller released “Home of the Brave”.

That year she covered Dusty Springfield‘s “Silver Threads And Golden Needles”. Her tune, “ Queen of the House“, set a pattern of releasing either answer songs or covers of other original recordings. This time it was in response to Roger Miller’s “ King of the Road“. In 1965 Jody Miller released another answer song. Her single climbed to #1 in San Bernadino and #4 in San Diego. In early 1964 Jody Miller released a song titled “He Walks Like A Man,” that was an answer song/commentary on the Four Seasons Top Ten hit, “Walk Like A Man” from early 1963. She moved to Los Angeles and was discovered by western movie actor and fellow Oklahoman, Dale Robertson, while she was performing at the Troubador nightclub. Miller got her start singing in folk clubs in Oklahoma. In 1949, she heard Mario Lanza sing “La donna è mobile.” Jody Miller recalls once she heard Lanza’s song, she determined she would be a singer. A year later Jody was sent to Blanchard, Oklahoma, where she learned to play the piano while living with her fiddle-playing grandmother. By the age of seven her parents were entering her in amateur contests around Oakland. Around the age of six, her older sister, Pat, would play the guitar and encourage Jody to sing. The youngest of five girls, Miller’s family spent some of her early years in Oakland, California.

Myrna Joy Miller was born in Phoenix in 1941.

Home of the free because of the brave song