During the American Civil War, many in the Confederacy rejected the anthem as pro-Union, preferring Dan Emmett’s “Dixie.” The result was one of the war’s great ironies: the South turned against a slave-holder’s song and embraced a blackface number by an anti-slavery Northerner. As his well-told anecdotes clearly show, the “Star Spangled Banner” was highly contested as both song and symbol. Another is that it took time for the tune to take on its sacred qualities as a national anthem.įerris is at his best in detailing this process. One is that the past really is a foreign country. There are at least two takeaways from this fact. Indeed, anyone who does research into the popular music of the nineteenth century will find a number of songs set to “To Anacreon in Heaven.” The list includes everything from patriotic numbers to ditties about farmers’ daughters and murderous rakes. Could it be that a touch of vulgarity, an element of the common, was an understood characteristic of the American identity? Ferris simply explains the choice by pointing out that the tune was popular. What did Key have in mind? Despite the fact that musicologists have long identified this as the anthem’s most intriguing mystery, Ferris does not have much to say on the subject. As Ferris points out, the tune of the “Star Spangled Banner” was the official song of London’s Anacreontic Society, a ballad, written about 1775, called “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Anacreon was the social club’s muse, a Bacchus-like character who inspired long nights of heavy drinking, wench chasing, and ale-inflected singing. Key set his poem to an English drinking song. According to Ferris, the English tended to use hymns for national tunes, particularly in songs like the unofficial anthem “God Save the King.” The French anthem “The Marseillaise” was written specifically for the Revolution, with a marching cadence to match its militant and bloody lyrics. After all, this was a prime moment for patriotic songs. As Ferris points out, he had a number of choices.
Key was probably thinking of a tune as he penned his verses. Between these two moments, according to Marc Ferris, the Star Spangled Banner would have a long and multifaceted career, as a song, as a contested symbol, even as a historical agent.įirst there was the song. Set to music, Key’s verses became “The Defense of Fort McHenry” and later “The Star Spangled Banner.” Two hundred years later, African American writer Amiri Baraka summed up the resulting song as “pompus, hypocritical, vapid, and sterile.” For Baraka the anthem was the product of Americans who “canonized themselves into some kind of Chosen People” (p. Lawyer, slave-owner, and gentleman poet, Key dashed off an ode to the flag the next morning. Whether it did the first is debatable, but it certainly impressed Francis Scott Key. The point was to anger the British and impress local observers. On the night of September 13, 1814, as British gunboats shelled Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, the garrison commander ordered his troops to hoist an enormous forty-two-by-thirty-foot American flag. Reviewed by Brian Roberts (University of Northern Iowa) Star-Spangled Banner: The Unlikely Story of America's National Anthem.īaltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.