There is a scene from the documentary “Apollo 11,” rich with footage from the moon landing that took place 50 years ago this weekend, that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. I wrote about it when I reviewed the movie, and here I am writing about it again.

In the scene the landing has been accomplished, the crew is on their way back Earthward, and we see a cassette player spinning in zero gravity and playing a song, “Mother Country” by the folk singer John Stewart, that the film then adopts as a soundtrack for a few moments.

The song is about the oldest Americans of the Apollo era, people who grew up around 1900, when a century was born and a century had died. The singer offers a reverent nostalgia for their vanished youth, the vanished past — They were just a lot of people, doing the best they could … what ever happened to those faces in the old photographs … Oh mother country, I do love you.

In the astronauts’ context the lyrics aren’t directly related to the moon landing. But in our context, in 2019, they carry an almost unbearable crush of meaning, resonating backward and forward in time, binding the “old photographs” of 1900 to the old video images of 1969, the heroism of the astronauts to the heroism of men who stood knee deep in the Johnstown mud / In the time of that terrible flood. And this binding happens not through a contemporary artist’s artful choice but through the literal soundtrack of the Apollo mission itself.