Accessing the sheet music for a national anthem is, it turns out, quite complicated. Sharon Lee Toulouse, the director of the various marching bands at the University of Kansas (KU), could not simply watch a YouTube video and then take a swing. A national anthem is the sort of thing you have to get right.
Instead, she had to contact the United States Army Band – Pershing’s Own, as they are known – which acts as the repository of the music to all of the world’s anthems. Making use of her own military background, she got in touch with them a few weeks ago, asking if they might be able to furnish her with the official version of Kassaman, the national anthem of Algeria.
A couple of weeks ago, she was duly provided with access to an online database. She downloaded it, and presented it to one of the university’s bands. It was, admittedly, a bit of a leap from their usual material. The songbook for KU’s teams – known as the Jayhawks – at their home games in the city of Lawrence, is a broad church.
“Earth, Wind and Fire, maybe some Beatles, and we try to play some more current stuff,” Toulouse said. They did not have quite as much time to rehearse the new addition to their material as might have been ideal: they managed just 15 minutes or so of practice before performing it in public for the first time.
As far as Toulouse is concerned, though, both the research and the rush were warranted. She had wanted the band to play Kassaman when Algeria, based in Lawrence for the World Cup, held an open training session last week. “As they came out to train, we asked the players what they wanted to hear,” she said. “They said the national anthem. We told them we had it ready.”
When the six-strong band struck up the song from the bleachers at the University’s training facility, the players gathered in front of them to listen. “They were really happy,” Toulouse said. “No song means more to you than your anthem. We wanted to show them how welcome they are, how happy we are to have them in Lawrence. It was absolutely worth it.”
It is hard to underestimate to what extent the people of Lawrence – a college town of 100,000 or so a couple of hours southwest of Kansas City, Missouri – have taken Algeria to their hearts since the team first arrived in the city on 7 June. The band learning to play the national anthem was not only the start of what appears to be a beautiful friendship.
They were greeted by a welcoming committee when they arrived to stay at the branch of the Hilton DoubleTree on the edge of the city; they had chosen the hotel, a little less luxurious than those occupied by many of the other 47 teams in the tournament, because the players specifically requested to stay in a place with a pool.
The DoubleTree also had the benefit of being close to Rock Chalk Park, the state-of-the-art training base for KU’s football teams. That obviously outweighed the drawback that Algeria had not been able to book the entire hotel. As of last week, anyone desperate to be close to stars like Riyad Mahrez or Rayan Ait-Nouri could do so for as little as $205.
Since then, Lawrence has done all it can to embrace their guests, a city in the midwestern heartland of the United States suddenly bonded to a North African nation. Social media has been peppered with videos of residents chanting “Vive l’Algerie.” They have bought shirts and scarves to show their support. The open training session, which concluded with an hour-long coaching session for local children with Algeria’s staff, was packed.
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“I live just a little outside of downtown,” said Albert Auzenne, a California native who moved to Lawrence eight years ago. “There are quite a lot of houses which are now flying the Algerian flag, either alongside the Stars and Stripes or just by itself. It used to be quite rare to see anyone in a football shirt in Lawrence. Now I see people wearing Algeria kits.”
From the outside, that is very likely not how anyone might have expected this encounter to go. Algeria is a Muslim-majority nation. Lawrence is a relatively small town in Kansas, a state which has not so much as voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Six months before the tournament started, President Trump added Algeria to his list of ‘restricted’ nations, meaning fans were told they would have to post a $15,000 bond to attend the World Cup.
Auzenne believes Lawrence has defied the stereotype not only because of the city’s political affiliation – the presence of the university means, he said, that it is a consistently “blue dot in a red sea” – but because of its lived experience. “KU has a really strong exchange program,” he said.
“There are a lot of families in town who know what it’s like to have someone come from overseas, and stay in their home. I think that means you know what people need when they’re visiting, how to make sure they’re having a good time, that they feel comfortable, feel welcome. It’s just kind of ingrained in us to be welcoming to non-Americans.”
That it has also made Lawrence feel part of the World Cup is significant, of course, but the power of the story lies in the contrast: not so much between the people of Algeria and Kansas as between our expectations and the reality that we can track in real time. That is what has made it so appealing, so uplifting to those consuming it not just within Lawrence but across the United States.
As Ruth DeWitt, one of the community leaders who helped bring the team to Lawrence, said, it is “the love story everyone wants,” particularly at a time when much of the US is divided by – among other things – its relationship to those from elsewhere and at the start of a tournament which has been strip-mined for any sort of joy or pleasure, both by Fifa and by the Trump administration. Toulouse, too, sees it as a chance to offer a reminder of “what America can be. I’m proud of us for showing the way.”
There is little doubt, then, who the people of Lawrence, Kansas will be supporting when Algeria face Argentina in Kansas City this evening; Auzenne said he was expecting plenty of fans to make the journey to Arrowhead to support their box-fresh first love. Those who cannot make it will be treated to a celebratory block party back home.
There is, you would think, a decent chance that Kassaman will feature on that playlist. It seems to have caught on. When the band first struck it up, last week, Toulouse looked around the bleachers and realised that it was not just the Algerian fans who knew the words, it was the people of Lawrence, too. “Everyone was singing along,” she said. “It was magical.”
Photograph by Maja Hitij/FIFA via Getty Images