What exactly is the US national anthem?

score:57

Accepted answer

There is no "exactly".

First, one minor clarification: the bill itself actually passed Congress in 1930 (April 21st), but wasn't signed into law until March 1st of 1931. What you linked there was just a restatement of that law verbatim in the US legal code. The original text is of course the same.

One thing you have to realize is that back then it was considered an old drinking song, and nothing about it was under copyright. That means there was no such thing as a single definitive version, like one might imagine a modern song release should have. Anyone could modify, add, or omit verses (or notes), and if other singers liked it enough, that became part of some renditions of the song.

The tune was (mostly) authored by an Englishman in 1773, and was probably never covered under any kind of copyright law in the USA. The lyrics were written as a poem in 1814, and by 1929 long out of any copyright they ever may have had. US Copyright was very much looser at the time, lasting only 28 years, and even then only if the author explicitly registered it and extended it.

So at the time, this was just a patriotic song that was being sung in saloons, at ballgames, and at other appropriate times, and it would have been sung with whatever lyrics, verses, and arrangement the singer(s) felt like singing. The phrase "the words and music known as" is in fact as specific as it was possible to refer to it.

All this being said, there was an attempt a making "standard version" in the 1910's.

By the early 20th century, there were various versions of the song in popular use. Seeking a singular, standard version, President Woodrow Wilson tasked the U.S. Bureau of Education with providing that official version. In response, the Bureau enlisted the help of five musicians to agree upon an arrangement. Those musicians were Walter Damrosch, Will Earhart, Arnold J. Gantvoort, Oscar Sonneck and John Philip Sousa. The standardized version that was voted upon by these five musicians premiered at Carnegie Hall on December 5, 1917, in a program that included Edward Elgar's Carillon and Gabriel PiernΓ©'s The Children's Crusade. The concert was put on by the Oratorio Society of New York and conducted by Walter Damrosch. An official handwritten version of the final votes of these five men has been found and shows all five men's votes tallied, measure by measure.

Of course nobody really had the authority to enforce this, so performers would stick to it only as much as they preferred it to other versions. As the old joke goes, the best thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.

More post

Search Posts

Related post