O Say Can You Hear? A Cultural Biography of the Star-Spangled Banner
During the upheavals of 2020, woke activists discovered a “missing” verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” one that’s never sung, with its aspersion against “the hireling and slave.” In O Say Can You Hear? Mark Clague puts the line in historical context. Francis Scott Key’s reference was to units of formerly enslaved persons recruited by the British in the War of 1812. The lyric began as wartime propaganda—an op-ed on a pivotal battle, the contest for Baltimore.
As professor of musicology and American culture at the University of Michigan, Clague is well positioned to weigh in on our national anthem. His highly readable account sorts through many misconceptions. The hard-to-sing melody was written as a deliberate challenge for singers—and no, not as a drinking song even if its original performers probably were drunk. It began as an anthem—for a private London club, but the stirring tune gained attention in Great Britain and was introduced to the newly independent United States by a traveling musical theater troupe. It caught on—virally we’d say nowadays—and well before the War of 1812 became the musical prop for a plethora of broadside ballads transmitting the news of the day.
Key had already penned at least one set of verses to the melody before the war and—no—he didn’t write the new lyric in a moment of red-hot inspiration as the rockets’ red glare lit the sky above Fort McHenry. He was a well-treated prisoner and had ample time to compose his thoughts in a sophisticated rhyming scheme over several days of reflection.
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“The Star-Spangled Banner” caught on, its dramatic melody traversing “an emotional arc that moves through repeated struggle, then climax, and finally to resolution.” Shorn of its largely forgotten verses, it resounds with a call for unity and struggle on behalf of an idea of freedom. Clague cites a potentially ugly encounter in the late ‘60s between anti-war and pro-war protestors. It ended peaceably with both sides singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Could that happen today?
