Not more on Barack Obama this week. If his message to get past race is valid, then in homage, I will do so in this space today. I was pleased that C-SPAN was on board with that impulse a few weeks ago, when they did a three-hour interview with me on Book Notes. It was the rare occasion where I was asked as much about my work in linguistics as race. They even came to my home a few weeks before and filmed me doing assorted non-racial things like playing the piano and petting my cat (Lara’s press debut). My oldest friend says it’s the only interview that shows the real me.

It’s amazing the mail one gets after interviews like that. Life stories, unpublished essays, and even urgent requests from people who are quite literally insane. Or, one person observed how much he and I had in common, including that we are both apparently of small stature (I am, for whatever it’s worth, 6’1″).

Then there are the gifts, like a T-shirt with my name on it (?). Or, my favorite: a woman of advanced years cleaning out her attic, seeing that I am a musicals fan, sent me a souvenir program from the 1943 Cole Porter musical “Something for the Boys.”

Boy, that hits it on the head. Not only am I a great fan of Porter, but “Something for the Boys” was an Ethel Merman show, and for some reason that lady’s voice has made me deeply happy ever since I first saw her on TV when I was eight.

Yet the fact is that “Something for the Boys” was, as artistic worth goes, on the level of a hit television show like “How I Met Your Mother”: a paint-by-numbers confection that will leave people 50 years from now wondering why anyone cared. To most theatregoers in 1943, that would have seemed a sniffy dismissal of an utter delight. In the souvenir program, Burns Mantle at the Daily News deigned “Something for the Boys” “the cheeriest news the Broadway theatre has had in many weeks,” while Howard Barnes at the Herald-Tribune called it “the answer to playgoers’ prayers for a long time to come.”

Yet listening to a surviving radio broadcast of the original cast doing the show, it was just a lot of happy noise. More meaningfully to us now, a revival of “Porgy and Bess” was playing right then eight blocks downtown. Disparaged by the critics who mattered when it premiered in 1935, by 1943 it was reassessed as a masterpiece. The woman who sent me the “Something for the Boys” program also sent me one of the “Porgy and Bess” revival, where Burns Mantle, despite thrilling to the pleasures of “Something for the Boys,” conceded that “Porgy and Bess” had “genius” in it.

These souvenir programs were in my mind Monday when I went to the Rose Center at Columbus Circle and attended the concert performance of Leonard Bernstein’s failed 1976 musical “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” about various American Presidents, their wives, and their black servants. The show ran a week, and there was no cast album.

Yet this was an utterly gorgeous score. Talk about the “genius” of “Porgy and Bess”: song after song was manna along the lines of “Make Our Garden Grow” from “Candide” or “One Hand, One Heart” from “West Side Story.” Anthony Tommasini’s limp review over at the Times, seeming as if he attended a concert performance of “Something for the Boys,” is unreflective of the rapture among most of the audience members. But audiences in 1976 were no more receptive to “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” than Mr. Tommasini. Broadway habitues were all agog about “The Magic Show,” running since 1974 and as weightless a confection as “Something for the Boys.” Doug Henning did tricks amidst a fill-in-the-blanks score by Stephen Schwartz, then reigning Broadway with state-of-the-art scorage of the likes of “Pippin.” “The Wiz” was also a hot ticket.

Today, no one revives “The Magic Show,” and while there are plans to revive “The Wiz,” it won’t last long. It’s always interesting to see what is considered the Thing in a given era versus what will, after the party’s over, be sifted out of the mix as for the ages.

I am not old enough to have witnessed the mainstreaming of “Porgy and Bess.” But Monday night at Columbus Circle, I saw the sifting process in action regarding “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” The show itself would not work: the music requires audiophile attention beyond what works in a book show. But the score should be regularly done just as it was done Monday, as a concert, hopefully with more of the original material. I sensed, from the response of the arbiters of taste there, that this may well happen.

This night at the Rose Center was, for me, more interesting than anything I or anyone else has been saying in the wake of the brouhaha over Mr. Obama’s church. I submit this oped as evidence for the ages that in 2008, we were, with all deliberate speed, and despite distracting noises, getting over the 1960s.

All I knew was that the music I was hearing was splendid.

Mr. McWhorter is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.