[On July
22, 1893, Wellesley Professor Katharine
Lee Bates first composed the words to what would become “America the
Beautiful.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy “America” and other national songs,
leading up to a special weekend post on 21C nominees for new anthems!]
On a historical context
and predecessor that adds an interesting layer to our troubling anthem.
Thanks in large
part to Colin
Kaepernick’s protests and their linkage of the national anthem to questions
of race and equality, a good deal of recent
attention has been paid to Francis Scott Key’s largely forgotten third verse
for “The Star-Spangled Banner” (to be clear, only the first verse is sung at
most occasions). While music historians
differ on exactly what that verse’s brief and somewhat oblique reference to slavery
means, it seems pretty clear to this AmericanStudier—especially when coupled
with Key’s also largely forgotten status as an early
19th century slave-owner—that Key was at the very least leaving
enslaved African Americans out of his mythologized celebration of “the land of
the free and the home of the brave.” I’m already
very much on record as not-a-fan of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and none of
these close reading and historical contexts make me any more likely to belt out
Key’s anthem (even if I could perform the notoriously
challenging song).
Those aren’t the
only contexts for Key’s song, however, and a very different one offers a
distinct way to historicize and AmericanStudy the anthem. “The Star-Spangled
Banner” wasn’t the first set of lyrics that Key had set to the tune of John Stafford Smith’s popular
British work “The
Anacreontic Song”—nearly a decade before, Key set to the same music his
song “When the Warrior
Returns” (1805), a tribute to Stephen
Decatur and Charles Stewart, two military leaders returning to the U.S.
from the 1801-1805 First
Barbary War in North Africa. Originally published in the Boston newspaper
the Independent
Chronicle on December 30, 1805, “When the Warrior Returns” precedes the
national anthem in more than just tune, especially in the line, “By the light
of the Star Spangled flag of our nation” but also in the repeated closing couplet,
“Mixed with the olive, the laurel shall wave/And form a bright wreath for the
brows of the brave.” Clearly Key was not about a little recycling when it came
to his patriotic song-composing efforts.
Remembering this
prequel to “The Star-Spangled Banner” offers another and more important
historical context, however. As I wrote
a couple months back for my Saturday
Evening Post column, the War of 1812 itself can be analyzed less as a
heroic defense of America from British invasion (which had largely comprised my
limited understanding of it) and more as an international conflict closely tied
to U.S. territorial expansion. Engaging those sides of the War of 1812 might also
help Americans add the entirely forgotten Barbary Wars to our collective memories,
since those Mediterranean conflicts (and especially the 1815
Second Barbary War) hinged on many of the same international, territorial,
and nautical issues and debates that helped cause the strife with England. Which
is to say, “The Star-Spangled Banner” didn’t just represent an evolving, Early
Republic patriotic vision of American identity—it also and not coincidentally
represented an extension and deepening of U.S. presence and influence on the
global stage. George Washington might have warned his countrymen in his 1797 Farewell Address of “foreign
entanglements,” but our national anthem reflects just how fully entangled we would
become over the next couple decades.
Next anthemic
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other national songs you’d highlight?
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