I’ve never liked the “Star Spangled Banner.” It’s hard to sing even for the proficient of singers. It’s a war song, not a song about liberty and freedom. The lyrics. Well. Let’s be kind and say they stink.
Francis Scot Key wrote them while being held on a British brig during the Battle of Baltimore during the War of 1812. The soldiers of Fort McHenry repelled the British attack from sea. Key wrote these words a few months after his patrol was wiped out by British soldiers. The soldiers happened to be former slaves whom the British granted freedom for fighting on the side of the British. Key was the only survivor, and being a slave owner, he was none too pleased to have been defeated by a group of Black soldiers.
Let’s forget history for a moment. Our anthem is based on the poem by Key, which by any literary standard is a lousy poem. Its music is not original. It’s not even American. It was the music for the Anacreontic Society, a gentlemen’s club of amateur musicians. Its actual title, “To Anacreon in Heaven.” It was sung after meals when the booze flowed more freely. Hence it developed a reputation as a drinking song.
That’s the history of America’s anthem, which didn’t become an anthem until 1931. Our soldiers and citizens weren’t singing it during the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson ordered it played at military and other appropriate settings. I’ve wondered if this racist of presidents selected it for the third verse: … Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution./No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave… He was praising his dead battalion for losing to the Black “hirelings and slaves” who did not flee the fight.
What made it popular? Baseball. Yeap. In 1918, major league baseball started playing the song before games during the First World War. That is why it beat out “Hail, Columbia” and “America the Beautiful,” the more popular patriotic songs and much easier to sing.
The anthem’s history surrenders to nothing grand about America.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” however, does.
I’ve heard it many times, most strikingly when I heard a recording of the song by Melba Moore. There are recordings by Branford Marsalis, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and BeBe Winans, Beyonce, and a host of other performers. You may have heard a version of the song at the start of the NFL games this past weekend as performed by Alicia Keys. Its history tells the story of America.
The lyrics were written by James Johnson in 1900. His brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, put it to music in 1905. It was first performed as a poem in a celebration of Lincoln’s birthday. In 1919, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People declared it the “Negro national anthem.” For the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City, Augusta Savage sculpted “The Harp,” a commissioned piece, which was inspired by the anthem. Unfortunately, she could not find the funding to have the sculpture cast in bronze, so the plaster cast was destroyed at the end of the fair.
It’s time we make it the national anthem.
Lift ev’ry voice and sing,
‘Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on ’til victory is won.
Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
‘Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.
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