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The song does require a heroic commitment.
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Often it was sung by a professional actor, someone equivalent to a Broadway singer today. The melody comes from a song sung at a musician’s club in England and was intended to be a rousing, challenging tune that really highlighted the skills of club members. It’s entirely the range required: The distance between the lowest and highest notes is unusually wide. For me, calling the country to account and calling Americans to live up to our ideals is really a function of the song, and it doesn’t disrespect it to call attention to where the country falls short. In a way, the anthem started as a protest song because it created a vision of a united future that didn’t exist in 1814. What do you make of protesters who take a knee during sporting events? An upbeat song of victory has become a solemn hymn of national devotion. We have made the ritual last longer: We sing the anthem at a slower tempo today than would have been the case in Key’s day. If things had been a little different, ‘ Hail, Columbia’, ‘ America the Beautiful’, or even ‘ My Country, ’Tis of Thee’ were all contenders for that honour.What China is – and isn’t – learning from military drills near Taiwan
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So, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ started life as a poem called ‘The Defence of Fort M’Henry’, was written not by one of America’s leading poets of the day but by an amateur, and – despite being written in 1814 – only became the official US national anthem in 1931. These words, of course, have become famous beyond the poem (or song): many people refer to the United States as the ‘land of the free’, especially.
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(Ironically, in light of the circumstances surrounding the composition of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, ‘Rule, Britannia’ is about the might of the British navy: ‘Britannia, rule the waves’.) Throughout ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, Francis Scott Key uses the refrain, ‘O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave’. This is a message carried by many other national anthems, unofficial or otherwise: one of Britain’s most popular national songs (although not its national anthem), ‘ Rule, Britannia’, proudly proclaims that ‘Britons never, never, never shall be slaves’. The US flag with its stars and stripes waves freely over the land of the free, declaring America’s freedom from tyranny or oppression at the hands of another power. (It’s worth bearing in mind that less than forty years earlier, the United States was still fighting a war with Britain over US independence.) But, in a clever image, Key says that the confident footprints the British left as they marched to attack the American fort have been washed away by the blood of the British wounded and slain it’s a neat metaphor that encapsulates the idea of arrogance being destroyed by humiliating defeat.īut freedom is the message that shines through more than any other. Where the second stanza called the British fleet a ‘haughty host’, suggesting it was sheer arrogance and superiority which led the Brits to attack Baltimore Harbour and Fort McHenry, Key continues this line of argument in the third stanza: the British navy ‘vauntingly swore’ that the confusion of battle would leave the Americans without a home or a country. O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave. No refuge could save the hireling and slaveįrom the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:Īnd the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave, Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution. That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,Ī home and a country, should leave us no more? And where is that band who so vauntingly swore