Montana, Colorado, Nevada

words by Nancy Schimmel and music by Judy Fjell
© 2004 Nancy Schimmel and Judy Fjell

Nancy Schimmel, our 2019 Magic Penny honoree, shares “Montana, Colorado, Nevada” with us, a song with thoughtful humor that highlights the existing diversity in our nation. She says:

“I wrote the song thinking about the folly of the 1986 state proposition declaring English the ‘official’ language of California. The proposition, clearly xenophobic, passed. Never mind that our state capital is Sacramento, the first capital was Monterey, and our largest cities are San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“I wrote it with Judy Fjell, who lives in Montana, where I have visited her many times. We were going to do an album of songs about the West and recorded this and other songs on one of those visits about ten years ago, but life intervened. It’s just now coming out as a general children’s album called I Think of a Dragon.

“Oh, and my process was to find on the Internet a list of Spanish words absorbed into English and choose from them what worked in the song.”