Used almost exclusively in verse, the real first word of “The Star-Spangled Banner” - O - is, according to linguist Arika Okrent, a vocative O. The first word of “The Star-Spangled Banner” is not “Oh.” It’s likely he intentionally fit the words of his “Defence of Fort M’Henry” to the tune of “The Anacreontic Song.” It quickly became the standard tune to which Key’s poem was sung, and it is now the national anthem of the United States. Stafford’s tune was often appropriated for patriotic songs, and Francis Scott Key would have been familiar with it. This last line is an invitation to get drunk and naughty. Venus is the Greek goddess of love and sex, and Bacchus the god of wine. I’ll lend you my name and inspire you to bootĪnd besides I’ll instruct you like me to entwine Voice, fiddle, and flute, no longer be mute, It ends like this (starting where “And the rockets’ red glare” is sung in the national anthem): The result was “The Anacreontic Song,” or “To Anacreon in Heaven,” and its lyrics were no staid bastion of propriety.
Sometime in the late 1760s or early 1770s, John Stafford Smith wrote music to accompany words written by Society President Ralph Tomlinson. The Anacreontic Society was a gentlemen’s club of amateur musicians founded in 18th-century London and named for Anacreon, a 6th century B.C. The tune for the national anthem is a British song about sex and drinking. Though you might say he “composed” the poem in a broad sense, he was not what is considered “a composer.” Some historians even believe he was tone deaf. He was a lawyer and an amateur poet who, on September 14, 1814, wrote a poem called “The Defence of Fort M’Henry” while aboard a British ship during the night-long bombardment of Fort McHenry, Baltimore.
Francis Scott Key will not - and should not - appear on that list. On a list of the country’s greatest composers, you’ll find familiar names like Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and George Gershwin.
Francis Scott Key did not compose “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Here are eight things that might surprise you about “The Star-Spangled Banner” and its divisive history: 1. What is less known is that the journey from poem to anthem was long - more than a century - and fraught with controversy. How and why Francis Scott Key wrote the poem that would eventually become our national anthem is a well-known American legend.
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