Star-Spangled Banter

Not Exactly an American Tradition

On this election eve, I'd like to tackle a subject that's become a bit controversial in recent months: The national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner."  But I'd like to start by clearing up a few misconceptions.

First, it didn't even become the national anthem until an act of Congress in 1931.  Read that date carefully: 1931.  Herbert Hoover was President.  Not much good came from the Hoover administration, which is why he was fortunately only a one-term President.  Let that sink in a moment: Its selection was a morale booster during the catastrophic early years of the Great Depression.

Second, musically it's borrowed from "The Anacreontic Song," a drinking song from a society of Eighteenth Century English revelers replete with neo-Classical Pagan self-styling.  Given the nature of the society, that the song is difficult at best for even accomplished performers to sing, spanning over an octave and a half of range, comes as no surprise.  But for a nation with as rich a tradition of native musical forms as the United States, from blues to bluegrass, country to rock to rap, that our anthem lacks domestic musical roots is a national embarrassment.

And third, while we only typically sing the first verse at ballgames, Francis Scott Key's poem actually contains four verses.  Key was a slave-owning lawyer who used his office as U.S. Attorney to prosecute abolitionists, and those rarely-sung latter verses contain an affirmation of slavery. THAT is what so many athletes have been up in arms about in recent months.  A century and a half after the Civil War, we shouldn't be carrying on cultural traditions that edify the abhorrent practice whose end necessitated said war in the first place.

Yes, But If Not That, Then What?

Well, there are no shortage of options. Pre-1931, one of the most common unofficial choices when an anthem was required was "Hail, Columbia," which was originally composed for George Washington's first inauguration, and thus has literally unimpeachable American roots.  "America the Beautiful" is the end product of combining works by two famous Americans, writer Katharine Lee Bates and musician Samuel A. Ward.  Or, staying classical, you have pretty-much the entire catalogs of John Philip Sousa and Aaron Copland to work with.

But why stop there? Our nation is replete with musical homages in nearly every genre, from Night Ranger's "(You Can Still) Rock in America" to competing folk songs named "America" by Neil Diamond and Simon & Garfunkel, respectively, to a jukebox-full of country numbers by artists like Brad Paisley.  OR, we could explore the roots of all of those in choosing a work by blues legend Robert Johnson; consider, for a moment, how epic it would be to celebrate our country to the tune of Johnson's epic "Traveling Riverside Blues," perhaps best-known today for it's metal rendition by Led Zeppelin, who are, admittedly, English, despite frontman Robert Plant's fascination with American musical traditions.

Or, as I have been tongue-in-cheekly suggesting for nearly a quarter century, we could instead pick a song that celebrates our modern American identity like no other, and opt for Meat Loaf's epic, "Paradise by the Dashboard Light."  Nothing screams America quite like sex in a car described as a baseball play-by-play.