In his later years, Crumb frequently returned to American hymns and spirituals as a wellspring of inspiration: In the 2000s, he published over a dozen arrangements of old American folk material that he grouped together under the larger title American Songbook, including The Winds of Destiny. So the material goes very deep into a still-unhealed wound in the American psyche." "These were American songs from a time when the country was torn apart, and they reflect the kind of emotional intensity of the divide and also the longing to come together. "There's the same loneliness, bitterness, sourness that these songs reflect from the Civil War period," Sellars said.
In a 2011 interview with All Things Considered, Sellars observed how Crumb had tapped into still-unresolved elements of American history. In 2011, theater director Peter Sellars staged the work, featuring soprano Dawn Upshaw along with amplified piano and a percussion quartet. Political divide and the anguishes of war were a subject Crumb returned to in his 2004 work The Winds of Destiny, for which he arranged Civil War-era songs.
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