![]() Once it was written out, and spread through cheap songbooks, “ Anacreon in Heaven” became popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and creative Americans often adapted the music to other words. ![]() The music is usually attributed to an English composer, John Stafford Smith, but some uncertainty persists despite prodigious attempts by American bibliographers to nail it down. One witness complained that “the proceedings were very disgraceful to the Society as the greatest levity, and vulgar obscenity, generally prevailed.” Ironically, one of its leading spirits was a British Army officer, Sir Richard Hankey, who was sent to quell the Americans, rebelling at precisely that moment. The song was composed in the mid-1770s for a London club, the Anacreontic Society, which named itself after Anacreon, a Greek poet who worshipped “the Muses, Wine and Love.” The Anacreontic Society did its best to live up to those goals, and the singing of loud drunken songs was an essential purpose of the organization. ![]() In fact, Key had already set an earlier piece of music to it, a celebration of two American war heroes returning from North Africa. “The Anacreontic Song,” or “To Anacreon in Heav’n,” was a popular bit of music in the United States when Key wrote his lyrics. Surprisingly, the sacred music comes from an organization that was anything but. Each performance forces us to relive Key’s emotional trauma during that long night 200 years ago, as we grimace our way through the rough patches of “the rocket’s red glare” and the “bombs bursting in air.” From high school graduations to retirement ceremonies, it is the soundtrack of our lives, a kind of musical bombardment that endlessly perpetuates Key’s agony of waiting and watching. Its martial strains launch every sporting contest, adding a kind of athletic drama of its own, as local singers labor to reach the higher notes most of us have no chance of hitting. In the early days of television, it was the music that terminated the day’s broadcasts, in those distant years when broadcasts mercifully ended. Indeed, from its murky origins, the song has become so ubiquitous that it’s difficult not to hear it. It has been testing our vocal chords and our eardrums ever since. Indeed, the invading army that shelled Baltimore that night has nearly as much claim to authorship as the composer, for the tune was likely brought to America by British soldiers at the time of the American Revolution. In the case of the Star-Spangled Banner, the story quickly finds back alleys worthy of 18th-century London, where the music was actually composed. The rest, as they say, is history.Įxcept that history is never quite as linear as we want it to be. He wrote out four stanzas of a poem titled “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” which was quickly published as a broadside and set to a well-known tune. 13-14, 1814, Key was elated to see the American flag still flying the next morning. ![]() Having witnessed the shelling of Fort McHenry by British forces throughout the night of Sept. Two hundred years ago, a Maryland-born lawyer, Francis Scott Key, poured out his anxious feelings for the fate of his country. The story of the song’s composition is well known, and nearly as sacrosanct as the 36’ by 42’ flag that inspired it, a beloved relic in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. There will be fireworks, jet flyovers, and-one can hope-an impromptu off-key rendering by Vice President Joe Biden, the guest of honor. The Star-Spangled Banner, so often a prelude to our ceremonies for others, finds itself on center stage this weekend as Baltimore, the city of its birth, celebrates the national anthem’s bicentennial. He edited American Speeches for the Library of America, and Listening In: The Secret White House Tape Recordings of John F. Ted Widmer is a historian based at Brown University. ![]()
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