Vote For State Song May Not Be Online

By GRETCHEN PARKER The Tampa Tribune

Published: Sep 21, 2007

They're coming in faster now, as many as four a day. Bundles of CDs, tied in bubble wrap, dispatched by overnight mail. Several songwriters, including one who drove from Miami, have handed theirs over in person.

As of Thursday, 81 candidates for state song had been delivered to the nonprofit Florida Music Educators' Association headquarters in Tallahassee. Now comes the final week for submissions, before the contest deadline Oct 1.

That's the good news. The bad news is: The association of music teachers says it doesn't have enough money to pull off the contest climax that it had hoped for - a Florida version of "American Idol" that would tally votes via the Internet.

The vision was to generate a somewhat democratically elected winner.

"I wish we could do more," said James Perry, executive director of the association, which operates with an annual budget of about a million dollars that is mostly generated from conference fees and dues paid by music teachers.

The show must go on, organizers say. The group still plans to judge the nominations and glean three finalists, one of which will be written into a bill for consideration by state lawmakers next session.

State Sen. Anthony Hill, D-Jacksonville, is leading the effort to find a new song and estimates it would cost about $10,000 to design a Web site that could broadcast the nominees and accurately tally song votes. He's appealing to trade associations and other private groups to help with the cost and says he's confident he'll find the money.

The music educator association took it on itself to launch the song search, crowned "Just Sing, Florida!".

So far it has written the rules, publicized the contest with the help of a public relations firm (which did some of the work for free), collected the nominations and worked with songwriters who submitted incomplete applications.

Panel To Pick Finalists

The heart of its work, though, has been to appoint a seven-member panel of teachers familiar with songwriting that will score each song and select the top three. That operation is still part of the contest plan.

What isn't yet known is what will happen to those three finalists.

One possibility, Hill says, is to ask Gov. Charlie Crist to pick his favorite of the three and write that one into a bill. It was Crist who indirectly sparked the song debate, when he nixed Florida's current state song from his inauguration ceremony eight months ago.

The purposeful omission piqued Hill's interest and sparked his effort to retire "Old Folks at Home," an 1850s-era tune widely known as "Swanee River" that some decry as racist because of its ode to plantation life and references to "darkeys." Later versions of the song sometimes omit those references, but the version committed by a legislative resolution in 1935 is the original one penned by Stephen Foster.

The goal now is to find an anthem that Florida is proud to call its own, Hill said. "If Florida is for everybody, its song should be for everybody," he said.

"We don't want to go through another inauguration where the governor doesn't want the song played," Hill said. Rep. Ed Homan, R-Tampa, has said he'll file a companion bill in the House nominating a new song.

Contest Popular With Residents

The influx of entries shows, Hill said, that Floridians are engaged and interested in finding a new song.

The songwriters in the running range in age from 8 to 86, Perry said. They're from all over the state. They are enthusiastic. Some included handwritten notes in their packages: "I hope I win!" and "I think I have the winning song!"

Staff members are listening to just enough of the songs to make sure they're audible, Perry said. The judging hasn't yet begun.

Perry tried to find a way to stretch his staff of six and his budget to include designing and running a contest voting Web site, he said.

If he gets the money he needs, "we'd be happy to create it and assist," he said. "But I just don't have the funds without some help on that. So we're going to do the thing we can do - lend our expertise, which was the thing we set out to do."

The association's main responsibility is to organize the all-state conference of 2,500 orchestra, band and chorus students that meets for five days in Tampa in January. At the same time, it runs a conference for thousands of its members the same week.

"My responsibility is to the association, to make sure we're fiscally sound, and we have to be careful to stay within those bounds," Perry said.

Association members, K-12 and college music teachers, pay annual dues of $100. Most of that goes to the National Association of Music Education, Perry said.

If you live in Florida, have a new song or permission to nominate a song from someone else, you can send your submission to Florida Music Educators' Association, Attention: Just Sing, Florida!, 402 Office Plaza, Tallahassee FL 32301.

Look for the rules on www.justsingflorida.org. If you have questions about the contest, call the association at 1-800-301-3632. Entries have to be postmarked by Oct. 1.

Reporter Gretchen Parker can be reached at (813) 259-7562 or gparker@tampatrib.com.