Randa Abdel-Fattah
speaker
3,221 appearances
41 recordings
9 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 8 Sep
Randa Abdel-Fattah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 38 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 15.
Appearances
Because everybody who's ever been a first-generation American, that is what they believed in.
Mm-hmm.
My favorite version is Aretha Franklin's 1972.
And without question, that moment was about the future, even though she was drawing on tradition in order to sort of propel her voice into what was coming.
I think Amazing Grace is really one of the clearest examples of this song that means so many different things to so many people, gets passed around, doesn't stay property of anybody.
The way that this particular song is available to Americans is a tradition.
Yes.
I think there's something really meaningful about it.
about trying to find the kind of resonance with each person who's sitting across from you.
And that does not mean agreement necessarily on anything, but there is value in trying to figure it out.
And in order to do that, you actually have to leave open possibility.
Yes, always.
As part of her series, Lara also hosted some live events across the country.
Next up, we're going to hear her conversation from one of those events with historian Jill Lepore.
I played this song on a snowy night in a 200-year-old barn in Brattleboro in front of a capacity audience.
It's a new arrangement of My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free.
Frances Hopkinson wrote the original in 1759 in Philadelphia.
It's often called the first American song because it might just be the first documented, formally notated song written on American soil.
Although there were songs long before that by indigenous peoples and the music Africans brought here in bondage.
Songs that dreamed of freedom.
Showing 601–620 of 3,221 · page 31 of 162
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