Katharine Lee Bates, a 33-year-old English literature teacher at Wellesley College, was on “a merry expedition up Pike’s Peak” in Colorado in 1893 when she looked out “over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies.”
Just my opinion: There will never, ever be anyone who could do this song the way the late Ray Charles did it. Period, new paragraph. I get gooseflesh whenever I hear it.