Booze, Blood, and the Star-Spangled Banner

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As 'The Star-Spangled Banner' grew in popularity, bands made it more playable by changing the key and slowing the tempo. (The tune was originally quite jaunty and irreverent, and to this day there is no officially sanctioned version.) Around the turn of the 20th century, the song was already used by the military during the raising of the flag, and 'The Star-Spangled Banner' became an institution.

It has since lost its hold on the public. A recent Harris poll showed that 61 percent of American adults admit they do not know all the words, and most who think they do really don't. (The second, third, and fourth verses are practically unknown.) Among teenagers, according to an ABC News poll, 38 percent don't know the song's name. Indifference toward 'The Star-Spangled Banner' is so widespread that a coalition of supporters -- including the entire congressional delegation of Maryland and honorary chair Laura Bush -- joined forces in 2005 to unleash the National Anthem Project, an effort to teach the song to schoolchildren.

After 9/11, the American Coalition for a New National Anthem began advocating Irving Berlin's 'God Bless America' as a replacement, but the Massachusetts-based organization has since gone into hibernation. Public figures ranging from Ray Charles to Ted Turner have spoken on behalf of 'America the Beautiful,' and in the past few years essays about the overthrow of Key's song have frequently appeared in newspaper op-ed pages, including those of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe. Six times between 1985 and 1995, then Democratic congressional representative Andy Jacobs of Indiana, a former marine, introduced bills to make 'America the Beautiful' the national anthem; all died quietly. (Before the official adoption of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' three-quarters of a century ago, the Music Supervisors of America, a group of education professors at Columbia University Teachers College, and the National Hymn Society publicly opposed it.)

A lot of people find 'The Star-Spangled Banner' to be lacking in feeling, bellicose (the rarely sung third verse declares of the invading British, 'Their blood has wash'd out their foul footsteps' pollution'), descriptive of a forgotten event, stale (the same tune served as the national anthem of Luxembourg before 1864), and difficult to navigate even for professional singers, who often apprehensively lead the song into 'a kind of musical stream of consciousness,' as Balint Vazsonyi observed nearly a decade ago in the National Review.

Even Key's biography is suspect: As district attorney of the city of Washington in 1835, he sought the death penalty for a mulatto slave who drunkenly yet unthreateningly appeared in a white woman's bedroom one night holding an ax. President Andrew Jackson ultimately pardoned the slave, and Key unsuccessfully tried to connect an abolitionist with the crime.

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