Posted on 07/02/2009 10:21:46 AM PDT by NYer
Although I have lived in the Washington, D.C., area since 1984, I am an orthodox Baltimorean by birth, nurture, education, baseball loyalties, and a settled disdain for offering tartar sauce with crab cakes. So I should be the last person to think the unthinkable about my native city’s principal contribution to American public culture (after, of course, the Colts’ sudden-death victory over the New York Giants in the 1958 NFL championship game). Nonetheless, I shall risk the charges of heresy and treason by proposing the following thought experiment: as America celebrates Independence Day, let’s ponder a switch in national anthems, substituting “America the Beautiful” for the poem Francis Scott Key wrote during the British bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor during the War of 1812.
Older readers and Americana buffs will remember that “The Star-Spangled Banner” won the title of national anthem in a close Congressional vote, nipping “God Bless America” at the wire in 1931. Since then, the anthem — which ranges over an octave and a half and is thus unsingable by anyone beside children, virtuoso sopranos, and castrati — has been vocally mangled by patriotic Americans from, er, sea to shining sea. The severe difficulty of singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” properly is the strongest argument in favor of replacing it. (That the tune to which Key’s poem was set, “To Anachreon in Heaven,” was originally a London drinking song is not a disqualification for right-thinking Catholics, although it might vex some of the evangelical brethren…)
Veterans of the Baltimore Catholic schools of the 1950s once knew three stanzas of Key’s lyrics; I venture to guess that less than 1/10 of 1 percent of my fellow-countrymen know anything beyond the first stanza today-if even the full first stanza is widely known. It would be a shame if it weren’t, though. For the “Star-Spangled Banner”’s best claim to canonization is that the stanza we all (try to) sing ends with a question, which is an appropriate way to end the national anthem of a democracy. Why? Because democracy is always something of an experiment. “Oh say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” — the question poses itself today, just as it did under the rockets’ red glare in 1814, and just as it will pose itself in every future generation.
“America the Beautiful” would, arguably, be a better national anthem, not because it’s less bellicose — it isn’t, with its paean to “heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved and mercy more than life” — but because it’s eminently more singable. Moreover, Katherine Lee Bates’s lyrics acknowledge that the wonder of America is a gift of God’s grace, while reminding us that to be a nation “under God” means being a nation under judgment. Thus the fine second stanza — the one you get to after extolling “purple mountain majesties” (please note: not “purple mountain’s majesty”) — teaches us the always useful lesson that faith, reason, freedom, and the rule of law go together in a national experiment that also has the character of a pilgrimage:
O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America, America, God mend thine every flaw;
Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law!
Bates’s unapologetic linking of the American democratic experiment with divine providence, divine guidance, and divine judgment probably renders “America the Beautiful” unacceptable to today’s secularist thought-police and their allies in the federal courts; one can easily imagine the ACLU contesting “America the Beautiful”-as-national-anthem on the grounds that singing about God shedding his grace on the United States violates the First Amendment (just as one can imagine certain parties deploring the notion that God’s grace is “his” grace).
So swapping Keys for Bates is an idea whose time may not yet have come — and the shades of Baltimoreans past can rest easy. Still, both anthems, with their stress on sacrifice for the common good, give us something to think about, come the Glorious Fourth.
Absolutely true. Much of poetry is risking “high falutin’” language. If it “works” with a given reader, it’s poetry. If it falls flat, it’s just laughable.
1. Just because this guy thinks nobody knows all 4 verses but Commies and Birchers (I'm neither and I know them all) doesn't make it true. Moreover, it doesn't make it grounds for changing it (who knows all the verses to "God Save the Queen"? I do, including the one they dropped which prayed God to "arise/Scatter thine enemies/and make them fall./Confound their politics;/Frustrate their knavish tricks/ On Thee our hopes we fix / God save us all!")
2. It's NOT an octave and a half, it's an octave and four, and all except a couple of notes is within the octave.
This guy must be parroting an article that came out a couple weeks ago agitating to change the anthem, because that writer made the same obvious error. This looks like a concerted campaign rather than a groundswell.
3. It's not hard to sing, but there's a trick to it. The third note, not the first note, is the lowest note in the whole tune. If you start in the middle of your range, you'll wind up topping out early (naturally). Just start low.
I wonder who's behind this campaign, and why?
Good catch. I’d missed that entirely.
I’ve read and heard these arguments for changing the anthem many times.
Here are my reasons why it should stay.
1. Go to Fort McHenry and hear the NPS guides tell the story. It’s about a free people defending their home.
2. If you are at a ceremony where several anthems are played, you will realize how majestic ours is.
3. Those words are a challenge to us from all who created, built, and defended the country. Does it still wave?
4. Have you ever heard of Capt. Humbert Roque Rocky Versace, 5th SFGA? He was awarded the MOH on 12/21/01.
He was executed by the Viet Cong in 1965. He sang the Anthem when ever he could, even when they beat him into the ground.
Our Anthem is special!
Or 0bambi’s favorite:
Born in the USA,
(How I wish) I were born in the USA
I thought it "sounded Biblical" but had never run down the quotation. Neat.
Also John 10:12-13 indicates that hirelings were not well thought of.
Holman Hunt, "The Hireling Shepherd". Packed with symbolism as only Hunt could pack it in . . . .
As well as The Star Spangled Banner, The Marseillaise; O Canada and God Save The Queen can put quite a strain on the vocal chords.
I agree: no. Sometimes conservatives need to say, “No” to change simply because change begets and justifies change. If we can change the National Anthem in 2009, we lose the “we can’t change the anthem ever” argument is people want to change it again in ten or twenty years...and God only knows if the song proposed a decade from now would even be in English.
I think, today, with President Obama at the national helm, more than ever it is fully appropriate to sing the Anthem off key and end it with a question.
With this administration in place we’ll be lucky if we don’t get stuck with the Internationale!
As well as The Star Spangled Banner, The Marseillaise; O Canada and God Save The Queen can put quite a strain on the vocal chords.
Yeah, I'm sure some of you ladies out there in FReeperland can still do both. My point is how few of you there are.
I can sing the “Star Spangled Banner”, but it is a tricky tune. Yet, that’s the point. It should be difficult to sing.
*has to admit that Capcom made rockin' tunes for the two American characters in SFII*
In all seriousness, what's wrong with the current one?
I think it should stay because of its history ... and because of the fact that liberals have always hated it and felt it too “militant.”
It’s not very singable, but everybody knows the tune, and you just drop out on the high notes. Or the low notes, depending on your voice.
I already answered that (”what’s wrong”) and also pointed out that I don’t lose any sleep over keeping the current one. It just wouldn’t be what I’d pick if I were starting from scratch, for the reasons noted.
It's a bloody drinking song, for pity's sake! OF COURSE it's not hard to sing.
If you don’t think TSSB is hard to sing (in the sense of “for a typical Joe at a ballgame”), what DO you consider “hard”?
I did grow up in a "singing family", which may have helped
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