Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

Everything Bethlehem is known for

13 songs mention this city 0 artists from here

Music in Bethlehem

Songs About Bethlehem

On The Road To Bethlehem
Charles Esten
82%
"On the road to Bethlehem"
The Scrapple Song
Robbie Fulks
54%
"And the folks up 'round Philly and Bethlehem"
Allentown
Billy Joel
51%
"Out in Bethlehem, they're killing time"
Gimmick Wrestling Hometowns
JKGenius75
18%
"Deathlehem, PA (Blind Rage)"
Four Winds
Bright Eyes
16%
"Slouching towards Bethlehem"
Born In Bethlehem
Third Day
7%
"Is born in Bethlehem"
Beautiful Star of Bethlehem
Emmylou Harris
6%
"Oh beautiful star of Bethlehem"
There’s A New Kid In Town
Keith Whitley
4%
"Here in Bethlehem"
NFWMB
Hozier
4%
"To Bethlehem, it slouched"
Beautiful Star of Bethlehem
The Judds
3%
"Oh, beautiful star of Bethlehem"
Children, Go Where I Send Thee
Kenny Rogers
3%
"Born, born, born in Bethlehem"
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Old 97's
3%
"How that in Bethlehem was born"
Silent Night Medley (O Holy Night, Silent Night, O Come All Ye Faithful)
HANSON
3%
"O come ye O come ye to Bethlehem"

Artists From Bethlehem

No artists from Bethlehem in the database yet.

Rivers & Roads in Song near Bethlehem

Songs written about the waterways and highways that run near Bethlehem.

Interstate 95 19 songs

History of Bethlehem

Where 'A Clean Slate' Comes From RoadyGoat

1840

When you say you're starting with a clean slate, you're talking about this exact rock. Before cheap paper, schoolchildren wrote on small framed boards cut from slate, scratching letters with a slate pencil. At day's end you simply wiped it blank and started over, which is precisely where the phrases 'a clean slate' and 'wipe the slate clean' come from. And this is no distant fact for Slatington. The town became the nation's leading maker of school slates and blackboards, its factories turning out over a million pieces a year in the early nineteen hundreds. So the rock under this borough wasn't just on the roofs of America's schools, it was the writing surface inside them. Every classroom blackboard, every child's wiped-clean slate, every fresh start that phrase now means, traces back to gray stone like the kind quarried right here.

15.1 mi away

The Town That Took Its Name From a Rock RoadyGoat

1845

Here's a town that bet its whole identity on a rock. Slatington sits on the west bank of the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, and it is named, plainly and proudly, for the slate quarried right under it. In the eighteen-forties two Welshmen are credited with discovering the slate beds here, and the Lehigh Slate Company laid out the town in eighteen fifty-one. No fewer than twenty quarries opened in and around the village, making this stretch the heart of the Lehigh Valley 'slate belt,' one of the great slate-producing regions in America. The stone went out as roofing shingles, mantels, and classroom blackboards. The industry slumped after World War One, but the name stayed. You are standing in a place that told the world exactly what it was made of.

15.2 mi away

Mud That Learned to Split in Straight Lines RoadyGoat

Slate begins life as the dullest thing imaginable: mud. Layers of fine clay settle on an ancient sea floor and harden into shale. Then the Earth goes to work. Buried deep and squeezed by mountain-building pressure, with the heat that comes with depth, the shale is metamorphosed. Its microscopic, flaky clay minerals can't survive that squeeze lying every which way, so they rotate and regrow, all lining up in the same direction, perpendicular to the pressure. That hidden alignment is why slate splits into thin, flat, even sheets along planes that often have nothing to do with the original mud layers. Geologists call it slaty cleavage. It is the reason Slatington's stone could be peeled into roofing shingles and blackboards. The rock under this town remembers, in every clean split, the direction the mountains once pushed.

15.2 mi away

Bethlehem Steel Stacks

1857

Once the second-largest steel producer in America, Bethlehem Steel forged the beams for the Golden Gate Bridge, the Empire State Building, and most U.S. warships.

Historic Moravian Bethlehem

1741

Founded on Christmas Eve 1741 by Moravian settlers, Bethlehem became a center of early American music and communal living.

Everything Near Bethlehem

52 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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