The Great American Black and White

music and lyrics by Georgia Stitt

From Playbill’s Track-By-Track Breakdown Feature (3/27/20):

“THE GREAT AMERICAN BLACK AND WHITE”
So much credit for this song has to go to Hunter Foster, the book writer of The Big Boom, the show I’m currently writing. Hunter wrote a monologue about how divided our country is and I turned that monologue into a song. We premiered it at a benefit for the NYCLU (thank you, Sean Green, Jr., for introducing it to the world) and it remains one of the unchanged fixtures of the score even though the show around it keeps changing. Brandon Victor Dixon is one of those performers who listens in rehearsal more than he talks, so I kept trying to explain to him what I thought the song was about. Finally he said, “Oh, I get it,” and he even opted up on the high note, which is how I know he really did.

LYRICS:

Liberals hate religion and the greedy corporations
Business hates the liberals and the poor
Poor folks need religion so they tend to be conservative,
Though liberals probably care about them more
After each election you’ve got all these evangelicals
claiming God’s the only one who leads
But religion can be selfish, so you find these poor believers
asking government to satisfy their needs.

It’s all a circle.
Who’s wrong? Who’s right?
You didn’t come to hear me out;
you came to fight.
It’s what we do now.
I bark, you bite.
The Great American Black and White

That hurricane remember? There was Brooklyn underwater
People screamed for FEMA to appear
Liberals shouted outrage, started wars all over Facebook,
But the Mormons were the first ones who were here
You can keep religion and those politics of power
Sometimes I don’t know where to begin
If you don’t subscribe to any one group or another
then you’re never on the outside looking in
It’s all a circle. It’s all a game
There is resistance everywhere, but we’re all the same.
Go stake your claim now Choose left, choose right
The Great American Black and White

Are you brave enough to say what you believe?
Even if it means you stand alone?
Heroes are the humans who see the other humans
and dare beyond the things they’ve always known

It’s all a circle It’s all a race
Until you look into your opposition’s face
And meet a person who could be right
That’s how we get beyond this blight
Of the Great American Black and White.