National Anthem Day

What the day is

National Anthem Day is observed on March 3, marking the 1931 resolution, signed by President Hoover, that made the Star-Spangled Banner the national anthem of the United States.

Origin and background

The gap is the surprising part. Francis Scott Key wrote the verse in September 1814, during the War of 1812, after watching the bombardment of Fort McHenry from a truce ship in Baltimore harbor where he had gone to negotiate a prisoner release. He could not see the outcome through the night, and the flag still flying at dawn gave him the image the poem turns on. That flag survives and is held at the Smithsonian.

For more than a century afterward it was one patriotic song among several rather than the official one. Hail, Columbia and My Country, Tis of Thee were both used in official contexts, the latter sung to the tune of God Save the King, which made it awkward at diplomatic occasions. Adoption took decades of lobbying, largely driven by veterans' organizations, against competing candidates including America the Beautiful and objections that ranged from the song's difficulty to its martial subject matter to its origin in a drinking club.

That origin is real. Key set his words to To Anacreon in Heaven, the song of an eighteenth-century London gentlemen's music club, composed by John Stafford Smith. It explains the anthem's notorious difficulty: the melody spans an octave and a half, which is beyond many untrained voices, and a singer who starts too high finds the high note near the end unreachable. The problem is structural rather than a failure of nerve.

The poem has four stanzas and only the first is ever sung. The rarely performed third contains a line about the slave finding no refuge, written by a man who himself enslaved people, and that text is part of a sustained public argument about the anthem rather than a footnote to it.

How to take part

• Find a comfortable starting note before singing it. Most failures begin in the first bar.
• Look up To Anacreon in Heaven and hear where the tune came from.
• Read all four stanzas, which most people have never seen.
• Visit Fort McHenry if you are near Baltimore, or the flag itself at the Smithsonian.
• Listen to another country's anthem and notice how tangled its history is too.