No, Martina McBride’s “Independence Day” Is Not About The 4th Of July
Martina mcBride in her music video for "Independence Day" (Photo Credit: Martina McBride / YouTube)
Martina McBride Released Her Song “Independence Day” In 1994
“Independence Day” was released on May 2, 1994, as the third single from Martina McBride’s September 1993 album, The Way That I Am.
The song peaked at number 12 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart and spent 20 weeks on the chart. Although she has had other songs that charted higher since then, “Independence Day” is widely considered her signature song.
Gretchen Peters wrote the song, and it took her over a year to write, mostly because she was afraid of the ending, she told The Tennessean in 2015.
The catchy and powerful chorus is hard not to sing along to:
“Let freedom ring, let the white dove sing. Let the whole world know that todayIs a day of reckoningLet the weak be strong, let the right be wrongRoll the stone away, let the guilty payIt’s Independence Day!”
If you just look at the chorus’ lyrics, you may think it’s about America’s Independence Day or the 4th of July and consider it a patriotic song. But that is not what the song is about.
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McBride’s Hit Song Is Not About The 4th Of July
If you listen to the rest of the lyrics, you will quickly find out that the song is actually about a mother who her alcoholic husband is abusing. The narrator is just eight years old when she decides to get out of the way of her parents fighting, and heads to the county fair. There, she heard whispers from her neighbors about how her dad was a “dangerous man,” but no one did anything to help her or her mom.
While the narrator was at the fair, her mom set fire to her house with her husband inside. The lyric, “They just put out the flames, and took down some names, and send me to the county home,” revealed that the mother was also inside the house.
Peters told The Tennessean how hard it was to write the ending, which is why it took her about 18 months to complete the song.
“The song kept on telling me, ‘This is how it ends. This is the story of this woman, her child, her marriage.’ And I was trying to exert my own control over that,” she said. “I just didn’t want it to be such a dark tale, but I am a big believer — I think thing one in songwriting is you have to let the song tell you what it is, and if you don’t do that, it’s not going to work. It’s not going to come out feeling truthful and authentic.”
The songwriter reveals that “a lot of that year and a half was just me waiting around, looking for some other way out — ironically, like the woman in the song.”
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If the lyrics didn’t tell the whole story of this sadly, all-too-common story of domestic abuse, the music video sure did. The powerful video starred Heidi Butler Prine as the eight-year-old girl, Darcie Jones as the mother, and Aaron Wrench as the father.
The music video premiered on CMT on May 20, 1994, and won McBride the CMA Award for Music Video of the Year. That year, she also won Song of the Year at the CMAs.
While the moment is the mother’s “Independence Day” and the day she sets her daughter free from the cycle of abuse, it is not about America’s Independence Day. Watch McBride’s powerful music video below.
