Things weren't going well in 1893. The country had settled into a depression that put one in five Americans out of work. Still, Katharine Lee Bates, after riding a mule to the top of Colorado's Pikes Peak on July 22, scanned the horizon and saw hope. "It was then and there, as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies," Bates, then 33, later wrote, "that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind."

Since Sept. 11 those lines: "O beautiful for spacious skies,/For amber waves of grain," and the rest of "America the Beautiful," have been on the minds—and lips—of millions of Americans. Willie Nelson led a chorus of stars, including Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt, in a rendition at the Sept. 21 telethon to raise money for victims' families. Following the attacks, "America the Beautiful" and "God Bless America" have vied for the title of unofficial national anthem, with the latter sung during the seventh-inning stretch throughout the baseball playoffs. But at an Oct. 16 Manhattan book party, guests—including ABC's Barbara Walters and Lynn Sherr, and 87-year-old Jane Grant, Bates's great—niece-sang just one tune, "America the Beautiful." "I saw some tears," says Sherr. "This is a song we sing in a moment of crisis and a moment of celebration."

Sherr, 59, should know. The party was for her new book America the Beautiful: The Stirring True Story Behind Our Nation's Favorite Song, published earlier this month. "This," says Sherr, "is a song about a country and its people, not about military hardware."

No doubt Bates would be overjoyed to know that her words, published in The Congregationalist, a Boston church weekly, two years after she finished it, still bring comfort. But the song is not hers alone. In 1882 church organist Samuel Augustus Ward, returning to his Newark, N.J., home from an outing to Coney Island, got a melody in his head and quickly wrote it on the detachable cuff of a friend's shirt. Originally titled "Materna," it was probably first wed to Bates's poem in 1904 by Clarence A. Barbour, a minister in Rochester, N.Y., who thought the words would go nicely with church music. No one has ever received royalties resulting from the song. Ward died in 1903 without getting a cent for his melody. Bates received just a single payment of five dollars for her verse. But it was never about the money. "It was a rare instance where two creations, totally unrelated, came together," says 20/20 correspondent Sherr, "and evolved into something more than each was individually."

Bates, born in Falmouth, Mass., the fourth child of Congregationalist minister William and wife Cornelia, was part of the second class of women admitted to Massachusetts Wellesley College. After graduating in 1880, she taught high school English for five years before going back to Wellesley, where she taught English literature for 40 years.

On her 1893 train trip to Colorado, Bates stopped in Chicago to see the World's Columbian Exposition, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus coming to America. There she saw the so-called "White City," made up of 14 neoclassic buildings illuminated by thousands of lightbulbs. That, experts agree, inspired the "alabaster cities" of her last verse. Says Robert Bidwell, 82, chairman of the Falmouth Historical Commission: "There were four or five birthplaces of 'America the Beautiful': Pikes Peak; White City; crossing the counts try through the fruited plains and purple mountains."

Bates, who never married and who died in 1929 from pneumonia at age 69, continued revising the poem, publishing the final version in 1911. Ever since, the song has had peaks of popularity—and six bills in Congress that attempted to make it the national anthem. "Everybody understands what this song is about," says Sherr. "It's hard to sing 'from sea to shining sea' and not be totally optimistic about this country's ability to survive."

Nick Charles
Diane Herbst in New York City