Nevada Day assignment

In a Sunday column some months back, I complained about Nevada's dreadful state song, "Home Means Nevada."

As beloved as it may be by those forced to sing it in school, truth is any rational standard finds our state song melodically uninspiring, lyrically stilted ("silvery rills?") and regionally biased. If it were the Reno fight song, you'd not hear a peep from me. But, hey, news flash: It's 2009, not 1933, and Nevada's largest city is Las Vegas, not Virginia City.

Criticizing the state song is, of course, dangerous. A few brave souls agreed with me last time I did it. Most readers told me to jump into a silvery rill.

Before you decide, let's review the first verse and refrain of "Home Means Nevada."

Way out in the land of the setting sun

Where the wind blows wild and free

There's a lovely spot, just the only one

That means home sweet home to me

If you follow the old Kit Carson trail

Until desert meets the hills

Oh you certainly will agree with me

It's the place of a thousand thrills.

Home means Nevada

Home means the hills

Home means the sage and the pine

Out by the Truckee, silvery rills

Out where the sun always shines

Here is the land which I love the best

Fairer than all I can see

Deep in the heart of the golden west

Home means Nevada to me

"Silvery rills"? I rest the stilted-language case.

Now let's talk regional bias. While I'm sure there are, indeed, many joys up north, let me go out on a limb here and suggest (and this is just a Las Vegas boy's theory, mind you): If there are a thousand thrills along the "old Kit Carson trail," imagine the thrills walking the pedestrian overpasses at the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana.

Anyway, you get my drift.

Now comes a call from Karl Breckenridge, the former columnist for the Reno newspaper and author of the book "You're Doing What to the Mapes?" He wanted some help trying to identify an anonymous rendition of the state song that includes a mysterious Southern Nevada verse.

He tells me he got it from a Reno guy who owned a music store who has since passed away.

"Nobody seems to know anything about it -- who sang it, or where the extra verse came from," Karl said, adding that he's talked to everyone he could think of, including the state officials "who couldn't find a dead fish in a telephone booth."

The mystery verse is clearly a later Southern Nevada adaptation, talking about big horn sheep and "mining sites to the neon lights," which didn't exist nearly 80 years ago, when the girl who was Bertha Raffetto wrote what would become the state song. (The mining sites existed, but not the neon, of course.)

So, this is where you come in.

I've put this mystery rendition of "Home Means Nevada" on the Review-Journal Web site. You can find it here: lvrj.com/mystery_verse.

Your homework, dear reader, is not to tell me how misguided and insensitive I am about "Home Means Nevada"; it is to tell me anything about this Vegas-centric extra verse. Extra credit goes to anyone who can identify the singers -- who are pretty good, by the way.

You have until Nevada Day (which masquerades as Halloween in lesser states) to solve the puzzle. Get to work, ladies and gentlemen.

Sherman Frederick (sfrederick@reviewjournal.com) is publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and president of Stephens Media.