An Anthem’s Humble Roots : Latvian Patriotic Song Rises From Teacher’s 10-Year-Old Tune

“My people are dying. . . . Their roots twist and die.”

--”Manai Tautai” (“To My People”)

Brigita Ritmanis-Jameson had almost forgotten the song she wrote about 10 years ago when it came booming out of the past, like a subterranean river bursting above ground with flood force far from the spring where it originated.

“Manai Tautai” was just one of about 35 patriotic songs that Ritmanis-Jameson and her family had composed to sprinkle into Latvian-language pop music albums she and friends made between 1969 and the late 1970s, she said. The music was for young Latvian-speaking audiences in the United States, Canada, Australia and other Western countries where refugees from the tiny Baltic nation settled.

It was with amazement, the 41-year-old Sherman Oaks music teacher said, that she heard from friends who visited Latvia this summer that one of those tunes had surfaced as an anthem of the Latvian movement that is trying to reclaim the nation from the Soviet Union.

‘Latvian Joan Baez’

Friends brought her a videotape of a Latvian television show on which Ieva Akuratere--”who is kind of the Latvian Joan Baez”--tried to sing the song, broke down with emotion and left the stage. Shortly afterward, she returned and told the audience that she would try again, if they wished.

“They began singing again and the camera began showing the audience. They were all singing along--adults, little children, everyone--and it was obvious that they all knew the words.

“I had heard that this was happening but to see it that way, after all these years that Latvia has been an occupied country, it gave me a thrill I cannot put into words. It was like winning the lottery.”

Another videotape, widely distributed in the Latvian community throughout the United States, shows a combination concert and demonstration outside Riga, the Latvian capital, on Oct. 7.

Some 20,000 singers took part in a choral show for a crowd that numbered “about 100,000,” said Inara Kalnins-Baldwin of Glendale, who attended the demonstration with a group of Latvian-Americans who made the videotape. It is impossible to judge the numbers on the tape, which shows an immense crowd surrounding the area, reaching in all directions to the evergreen forest on the horizon.

The ranks of the singers and audience bristle with the maroon-white-maroon flag of independent Latvia, which was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940. A banner draped over the stage named anti-Soviet dissidents and listed the years they had spent in Siberian prison camps.

At one point in the 5-hour event, the videotape shows Akuratere, a delicate-looking blonde, taking the microphone. The weather was chilly and overcast. Wisps of hair blew around the white fur headband that protected her ears as she struck a chord on a guitar and launched into Ritmanis-Jameson’s melancholy song in a high, clear voice, the vast crowd singing along.

She had no notion there would ever be such an event, much less that her song would be part of it, when she wrote it, Ritmanis-Jameson said.

Latvia, about the size of West Virginia, was inhabited by people ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Russians who incorporated it into the empire of the czars about 200 years ago, although its economy was heavily dominated by German interests.

Given to Soviets

It became an independent nation in 1918, after the Russian Revolution. But in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty of 1939, German dictator Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin divided much of eastern Europe between them, most importantly Poland. A secret clause gave Latvia--and its two small neighbors on the coast of the Baltic Sea, Lithuania and Estonia--to the Soviet Union.

The Soviet army occupied the country in 1940, was driven out by Hitler’s army during World War II, and reconquered the country in 1945, accusing many Latvians of collaborating with the Germans.

The country has been subject since then to a “Russification” policy under which large numbers of ethnic Russians moved in. Latvian nationalism was repressed until Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost-- “openness”-- allowed a revival of nationalism that erupted this year in demands for self-government by large movements in all three Baltic nations.

Born in 1947

Ritmanis-Jameson was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany in 1947 to Latvians who had fled the country in 1944. The family came to the United States in 1950, settling in Oregon. Her father, Andris, became a physician and she grew up in Salem, Ore.

Her family was active in the Latvian community, she said, and in the late 1960s she and other Americanized children of Latvian parents and grandparents bemoaned the lack of pop music sung in Latvian.

In 1969, she formed a band named “Dzintars,” Latvian for amber, the fossilized tree resin that Latvians regard as the national jewel.

Musicians came and went over a period of about 10 years, she said, “But I was the composer and arranger and director.” They played for Latvian-American gatherings and for Latvian-speaking groups in Canada, Australia and Europe.

Pop, Patriotic Mix

They made recordings, pressed at their own expense, and some cassette tapes, selling them at their appearances. Mixed in with the pop tunes, they included occasional Latvian patriotic pieces.

Like most of those, she wrote “Manai Tautai” with her father, the family poet. Eventually the group included her sister, Lolita, now 26 and a musical arranger for Warner Bros.

“Once we needed another guitarist to make a recording and we got an American, Paul Jameson, to help us. We got along very well, and I married him.”

The group’s music could not legally be sold in Latvia, she said, but found its way there on pirated audio cassettes, either taken back by Latvians who visited Western nations, or smuggled in by Americans and others of Latvian descent during visits to relatives.

“The black market in Latvia has been full of these tapes for years,” she said.

The appeal of her bootlegged songs was their direct pro-Latvian and anti-Soviet messages, she said.

“Latvian songs in Latvia were different. The artists kept the nation alive in songs and poetry, but they had to find ways of saying things that the Russian censors would not understand. They used symbols because they could not call the enemy by name.

“They’d tell mythical tales and just tell the Russians, ‘Oh, this is just an old Latvian fairy tale, it has been around for many years and doesn’t mean anything.’

“But the people would understand these references, like ‘when the wind rises, the tall trees will be chopped down,’ or a song about a secret thing that must be hidden in a chest, or about a sunken castle rising again out of a lake. The people knew what they were saying.

“But our songs were direct, not subtle like that at all.

Loss of Heritage

“Manai Tautai” is a lament that the Latvian people “are dying all over the world,” that oppression was robbing those in Latvia of their religious heritage, while the children and grandchildren of the refugees were becoming Americans, Australians or Canadians.

“Help us, Dear God. Help the Latvian people” go the words, “Scattered all over the world, their song is a song of sorrow.”

Amber dissolved almost 10 years ago and Ritmanis-Jameson moved to Sherman Oaks 5 years ago. She is a traveling music teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District, teaching in elementary schools on the Westside.

But with glasnost, the song from one of the Amber tapes that had been circulated underground for years was suddenly sung defiantly in public, popularized by Akuratere.

“I suppose she knows who I am, because she must have heard one of our tapes and come up with her own arrangement, but when she introduces the song, she just says ‘This song came to us from overseas,’ ” Ritmanis-Jameson says without complaint.

“She sings it with a different spirit than I wrote it. We sang it in the years of darkness, when things seemed hopeless. She puts a great deal of hope into the song, which reflects the way things are changing.”

Ritmanis-Jameson “has never made a penny” from the black market tapes, she said, and doesn’t care. “My husband says that this is better than a gold record; it’s like music was in the ‘60s, music that would raise the consciousness of an entire crowd.

“It’s like having children. Once you give birth to them, they have a life of their own. That song is theirs now, not mine.”