 Hello, everyone. My name is Mark Clegg. I'm professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, and I also teach in the American culture program. It's wonderful to be here today sponsored by the National Archives in a talk about my book. Oh, say can you hear a cultural biography of the star Spangled Banner. And I'm especially grateful to the National Archives because I did quite a bit of my research in College Park, Maryland at the archive there. And then also to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded me a public scholar grant to be able to do this work and that gave me a year to write the book I've been working in the book for over a decade. And it's really a labor of love. I think I fell in love with the star Spangled Banner in 1976 when the United States celebrated its bicentennial and I was nine years old, participating in neighborhood parade on my Schwinn bicycle, red, white and blue streamers flying out the back. And I can't believe that we're almost on the 250th birthday of the country. So I wanted to write a book about the National Anthem, my relationship to the National Anthem, but also one that really brings to life what I feel is a living anthem, is an anthem that tells our history, tells our past, but also talks to us about the present. So that's what I'm going to be talking to you today about. And I have a presentation, should be about 40, 45 minutes, may have some time for questions after that. But let me share my screen and you'll be able to see a PowerPoint presentation. And we'll have some musical examples on there. And it'll tell the story of the Star Spangled Banner. For instance, it's got key American lawyer and poet who wrote the lyric up through sort of how it became the National Anthem and some of the controversies that make it a very complicated song for today. But I think also in a way that helps us learn about who we are as Americans. It's a kind of archive, if you will, of itself. The song is an archive of American history. And that was part of the joy of writing this book because it's really about the whole history of America, not just about one song. All right, so here we go. So a living anthem, the complicated life of the Star Spangled Banner. And again, my name is Mark Clegg, professor of music ecology, music history at the University of Michigan. This is the cover of my book, I'll say, Can You Hear, which just appeared published by W. W. Norton. And it's really inspired by my teaching, by my work with my students at the University of Michigan. I teach a course on American music history, music in the United States. I spent more than a decade on this, but I would always kick off my classes every January when I teach this course with the rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. I played a video from the Woodstock documentary made in 1969 with Jimi Hendrix, who's pictured right above me, performing the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock to close the festival. The festival had run over time. It's actually Monday morning rather than Sunday night that he goes on. And really he's finished playing his set yet he performs the Star Spangled Banner. And I think he performs it in just a brilliant way, but one that combines patriotism and protest and that really articulates through the strings of his guitar, not only the song, and if you say the lyrics to yourself as you're listening to Hendrix play, you can hear these actually illustrating the words, especially Rockets and Glare and Bombs bursting in air. He works in the melee for taps, which has been used since the Civil War to honor American military sacrifice. And he of course had friends in Vietnam. He had been a member of the 101st Airborne paratroopers. And so this started a conversation with my students about the complexities of what it means to be American. And the rendition that Hendrix offers, I think, combines patriotism and protest. And so then that led to other questions like, where's the song from and how did it sound like in 1914 and why did Francis Scott Key wrote it, write it. And so I started to explore those historical rabbit holes. And that took me to the archive. That took me to primary source documents, as we call them in history, trying to find the story behind the mythology and the sort of the very simple story that I had been taught during the bicentennial when I was nine years old about Francis Scott Key, writing the song on the back of an envelope and that it was a poem that someone else said to music and he was a British prisoner. And it turns out that there's truth in that story, but there's also sort of a kind of myth in that story. So the archive helps us get beyond the myth, get to the facts. And history is always more interesting when you get into the archive and look at the details than it is in the sort of basic stories that we learn in sort of popular culture. So I really wanted to explore the anthem and sort of big picture questions about how music shapes our life as a music historian. I mean, my own life was shaped by music in the public schools on my friends were musicians, you know, I figured out I think who I was as a person through music and, and I think we figure out who we are as a country through music. I wanted to look at the question of like, what is patriotism? What does it mean to love a country? Could there be different kinds of patriotism? There's we sometimes talk about blind patriotism, we talk about critical patriotism. I explored coercive patriotism and sort of, you know, other kinds of engagements with what does it mean to love as a country? And really what I concluded is that there's nothing un-American about protest. That protest actually is an American tradition and that we use patriotic protest all the time to express a hope and a dream for the nation in the way that we want it to be. And I think Francis Scott Key did that in 1814 through his lyric and we'll get into that in a little bit. What the purpose of history is? How do we use history? And I think, again, it's about helping us figure out how we got to where we are and some ideas about how we might move forward. And then really to explore the anthem as a living document. I think one of the great things about song, about the anthem as a song, is that we have to bring it to life and performance, that we have to tell, we tell a story about who we are as Americans today, every time we sing it. We ask that question that Francis Scott Key asked at the end of the first verse that we sing in the sports stadiums, you know, oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave? Question mark. And that question mark to me is essential to unpacking the meaning of the star-spangled banner for us today. So the history of the star-spangled banner. Let's get a little bit into that. Oops, jumped. All right, so Francis Scott Key wrote the song that he originally titled, actually, Defense of Fort McHenry. In 1814, between September 14 and September 17, he actually spent three days on the song. It's not an instant compositional process that sort of came to him as a vision. It's something that he says he struggled over, actually, that he worked really hard at writing the words to the star-spangled banner. He wrote them after he witnessed a historic event, the bombardment of Fort McHenry, which guards Baltimore Harbor, and it prevented the British fleet, which had the most advanced weapons in the world at the time. They are sort of fearsome bombships, all named after volcanoes because they were supposed to rain fire onto their targets. But the defenders of Fort McHenry held firm despite facing superior firepower. They had the bravery and the courage to retain their positions, to maintain the fort, to guard the fort, to guard the city. And they saved the city of Baltimore from certain destruction, probably being burned to the ground, which the British were threatening to do. And of course, they had done this just a month before with Washington, D.C., where they burned the Capitol building to the ground. They burned the White House to the ground, the Navy Yards. And for us as historians, they burned the Library of Congress, which was in the Capitol building at the time. And so it was an incredible, devastating moment for the United States, an embarrassing moment for the U.S. military, unable to defend ourselves, and really sort of a low point of American history. And so a month later to have Baltimore succeed in defending itself against British attack was, to Francis Scott Key, nothing short of a miracle. It was a sign of God's favor on the new United States, that this would support the country going forward, that in our so-called Second War of Independence, which is what the War of 1812 is sometimes called, it was also a war with Britain, just like the American Revolution, the United States would be preserved. And so watching the heroism of American defenders from his own American truce ship, he was not on a British ship, he was on an American ship. We don't know exactly where that was located. It might have moved around during the battle, but it was the presence of the flag that flying above Fort McHenry, the American flag, that let him know that the Americans still held the fort, right, that there was still hope. And so that watching that flag throughout the day and night and hearing the bombardment gave him confidence, gave him proof through the night as he says that the flag was still there. So the next morning, it's misty, there's a lot of smoke still from the battle. He uses his spyglass. So this picture from 1912, which memorializes probably a little inaccurate. Again, they didn't have any guns on a truce ship as pictured here. He's also much further away. He's looking through a spyglass, not through his own eyes to see the flag, but he sees, you know, blowing the breeze. Eventually the flag flips up and he's able to see that the Americans still hold the fort and that the British guns stopping did not mean that the British had won, but rather that the British were retreating or deciding it was too costly to attack Baltimore and they were going to go away. So he memorializes this in song sort of inspired by the heroism of the defenders of Fort McHenry and he writes this lyric. This is the very first printing of it. There are around 1000 of these broadside single sheets of paper published on a printing press by the local newspaper. And this was probably published on September 17, 1814. And it has some interesting things about it. Again, primary documents are always sort of the lifeblood of the historian and that's what the National Archives does for us. It preserves these documents. So one of the interesting things about it is the title. So the title is Defense of Fort McHenry. It's not the Star Spangled Banner. You can see with the little red thing that popped up there that there's a story told. It introduces the circumstances that led to the writing of this lyric. Another really interesting thing. Well, there's the title and had that out of order. But yeah, surprising that it's not called the Star Spangled Banner from the beginning. And this is actually an important point, which is that Francis Scott Key did not intend to write a national anthem. He wasn't writing a song for all time. He was writing a song about a specific event. And this was part of a kind of discourse, a conversation, if you will, in song that was common in early America to write these so-called newspaper ballads or broadside ballads, a printing on a single sheet like this would be called a broadside. Another interesting thing about this is that if you see between the story and the actual words, it says, tune a necrion in heaven. So this is the very first printing of the lyric. This is a lyric that Francis Scott Key probably oversaw. He took copies of this lyric, this actual printing with him when he left Baltimore. So we know that he was around long enough to see the final print and probably to respond to, you know, were there any mistakes in this print? Was it good enough? So we think this represents his wishes as to how the song would be represented. There's a couple little typos in the text, so it's probably not perfect. But in any event, it already has the melody identified from the very beginning. And so this is important because we go back to that original broadside, you see words on a page, right? So it looks like a poem, looks like words, no music. But in fact, if we go forward, we see that the tune is identified. So this is a set of words that were written, imagined, to fit a melody that already existed. And this melody is called a necrion in heaven, and we'll get into some more of this. But I thought what might be fun right now is to listen to the very first arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner. And there's that arrow points to the question mark, by the way, at the end of the lyric. But the very earliest arrangement of the anthem was done by the organist in the Anglican Church in Baltimore, a man named Thomas Carr's friend of Francis Scott Key. And he arranged Key's words on a piece of sheet music that fit the anachronistic melody, what's called the anachronistic song, or a necrion in heaven. And this is what that performance initially sounded like. And I want you to listen to a couple of interesting things about it. One is that the tempo is quick. It's faster than we're used to hearing it today, just by a little bit. And that's because this is a song of victory. This is a song of celebration. We breed the British. So this is actually an upbeat song of celebration, party song, if you will. The function we have today where the Star Spangled Banner is more of a sacred hymn to the nation, and the tempo slows down, that's actually a shift because now it's the national anthem. In 1814, this was a song of victory, a song of celebration. The other thing that's interesting about it is that it's sung by a soloist, not by the whole crowd. So the way we sing it today as a community, singing it as a choir, is not the way it would have been sung in the 19th century for the most part. It would have been sung by a skilled singer. And that skilled singer would have been able to hit the high note. So not unlike the Super Bowl today, we get a really superstar singer to perform the anthem. But the crowd, in this case, echoes back what was considered the chorus in the 19th century. So those last two lines, that critical question that's in the lyric, oh, say does that Star Spangled Banner get wave? Or the land of the free and the home of the brave is sung twice. First by the soloist, and then by the assembly, by the audience, by the community. And this kind of conversation that happens in the performance practice of the 19th century where there's a statement and then an affirmation from the community is an important part of the way this melody function in many, many other lyrics that I'll talk about, was a way in which support was recruited for political causes. So this melody was also used for many other songs, including campaign songs for presidential campaigns like Thomas Jefferson, for example. All right, so here it is, the 1814 first musical arrangement, first published sheet music for the Star Spangled Banner sung by one of my students, Justin Berkowitz, conducted by one of my colleagues, Jerry Blackstone, and a bunch of our students. If you look really carefully, you can even see me in there in the choir, but here it goes. Oops, let's get it to work here. There we go. So that's the original musical arrangement of the Star Spangled Banner from 1814. And that little coda, that little musical tag is really interesting because you hear it echoed through arrangements that go all the way up through the U.S. Civil War. Sort of fun. All right, so where did the music come from? Music comes from London, England. It was the theme song, the club anthem of a musicians club, an amateur musicians club called the Anacriantic Society. Anacriantic Society was named after the Greek lyric poet Anacrian. And it was definitely a fun loving club, a convivial club. It's often said that the Star Spangled Banner is a drinking song, and that's sort of right and sort of not right. It's sort of right in the sense that this was a club that was, it was a men's, all men's club, which typical of London in the 17th century. 18th century, so 16, now what is it? 1766 was when the club was founded and 1773 was when this song was composed. It's a kind of advertisement for the club, so it's supposed to be upbeat and heroic. And it's a show-off song. It's meant to show that the musicians of this particular musicians club are better than the musicians of the other musicians club, like the Ketch Club in London. So it's meant to be a hard song to sing. It's meant to be an impressive song to hear performed, right? So that's why the high notes are in there. People are always like, why is the Star Spangled Banner so hard to sing? Well, the melody was supposed to be hard to sing because it was supposed to show off the skill of the members of the Anacriantic Society, which is why it has these very impressive high notes where the singer can really open up and show off. And I think it takes a kind of heroism to perform. There's a kind of athletic and emotional commitment that's necessary to really pull this song off. And so for me, it sort of fits that Francis Scott Key would choose a difficult tune, a tune that required heroism in a sense to sing to represent the heroism of the men defending Fort McHenry in Baltimore in 1814. The composer of the song is John Stafford Smith, who's pictured here much later in life. I don't have a picture of him when he was younger. This particular picture is from the Library of Congress in the nation's capital. And the sheet music actually is from the Clements Library here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the University of Michigan's American History Library. So I say it's a club song and not a pub song because it's really this very sophisticated highbrow club. They were an elite club, and they had like their meeting started with a two hour symphony and chamber music concert when Franz Joseph Haydn came to London. He was hosted by the Antichrist Society. So this is not a drunken boozy club, but they were definitely drinking alcohol in part because in 18th century London, there's no water purification. So if you're going to drink liquid safely, it has to be either coffee tea or fermented. So this was actually very typical of beverages for really anything in London in the 18th century. So let's hear this original song, how it would have been sung. Again, you're going to hear that same upbeat melody. One of the interesting differences about these early versions is they don't have the opening descent. You know, you can probably recognize the Star Spangled Banner if it's going to be performed by the first three notes. That's what we call a triad in music or peggiation going down to the tonic. But it serves as a kind of musical signal like, hey, we're going to sing the anthem. But this original song doesn't have all those snappy notes. This is a little different feel because it facilitates this rolling upbeat, energetic song that's initially an advertisement for the club and then is used by Key as this party song to celebrate the unexpected victory at Baltimore. So the opening is also a little different. You'll see the exact same social ritual in this music where sung by the soloist, in this case representing the president of the club. And this is another one of my former students, Jacob Wright, same conductor, Jerry Blackstone, and the members of the club are the ones who echo back those last two lines and sort of affirming the statement and the dreams of the president about how this club is going to flourish. And we're all going to be united and friends. And then the club echoes back that last chorus line. All right, so here is the anachronistic song from 1773, solo performed by Jacob Wright. So one of the interesting things about the lyric, this anachronic song, is that it actually has a unique poetic form. It's one of the reasons why I can say for sure that Francis Scott Key did not accidentally write a set of lyrics that happened to fit this melody. And the reason is, is because in the middle of the song, it has an extra embedded line in the middle of line five. So, you know, you're used to poems and the words at the end of the line rhyme. And this is very typical of poetry. When I was in high school, that's how we analyzed all the poems was by figuring out what the rhyme scheme was, right? So the rhyme scheme, interestingly, of the Star Spangled Banner has eight lines, but it has a ninth rhyme hiding in the middle. And that's in the sort of, the point of sort of dramatic crisis within the lyric, except that when we sing the high notes, right? So the Rockets read Glare, the buttons bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. So Glare, air and there make a triple line, rhyme rather, three rhymes in two lines. So that's where we get the extra ninth rhyme. So really pretty interesting how that all works out. So that's something to look for in these anti-creatic lyrics. And in the original one, it's voice fiddle and flute no longer be mute. I'll give you my name and inspire you to boot. So flute, moot and boot. So this tradition of writing new lyrics to popular song melodies. It's almost like folk melodies, like the Star Spangled Banner melody, the anti-creatic melody, would have been known in early America, just like, say, take me out to the ballgame or happy birthday is today. Probably anybody on the street could sing it. So everybody knew this tune. And if you wrote words to it, people would know how to sing the song. They wouldn't need to read music. They wouldn't need to print the music. People just knew it. It was part of their cultural knowledge of the time. So this tradition is sometimes called broadside balladry. So writing songs and printing them as sheets of words. They look like poems, but they're not. They're lyrics. They're song lyrics. And you have to remember this is before recording is invented. Thomas Edison invents recording in 1877. So we're 100 years before that, when the anti-creatic song was written, like good 60-some years before that, when the Star Spangled Banner was written. And so this was a way of getting song and having it move from place to place before recording, before streaming and YouTube and all those things. Another, I think, important thing to realize is that it's sometimes said that the town crier or the broadside ballad is about sharing the news in a day before universal literacy. This is right at the earliest time of public education in the United States. It starts in Boston in the early 1800s. So this is a time when not everybody is literate, but a lot of people are. But I don't actually think that it was about getting the facts around. It's not about sharing the news. What it is, it's about sharing the emotional importance of the news. So what Francis Scott Key did was not just tell you who won, because if you wanted to know who won, you would just say, did we win? Did we lose? What's happening? And someone would say we won. Oh, my gosh. So that would have been the reaction, right? But if you wanted to know what it felt like, what the news felt like, what the emotional importance of the news would be, this is where song became important because it puts words and ideas to music to emotion. And so it communicates the emotional significance of an amazing event, like the saving of Baltimore by the heroism of the militia and army and navy soldiers who defended the fort. So that's, I think, what the song is really about. It's about the emotional import. And Francis Scott Key is translating the feelings of watching the battle and the tension, the uncertainty, that question about the future of the country. He's translating that into music, into the language of emotion. And this was incredibly common in early America. These are some pictures of some other broadside texts, some that were published as specific musical texts, others as was probably the most common. That one on the left is from a newspaper published actually in my hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the Ann Arbor District Library archive. And it's from an abolitionist paper called The Signal of Liberty. And this is one of what I think is the most important lyrics ever written to the tune. We know today as only the Star Spangled Banner. Osay, do you hear? It's an anti-slavery song from 1844. And anyway, these kind of ballads were really typical. I've found 580 and counting of these broadside ballads written in America to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner beginning in 1790 and as recently as this week. Amanda Gorman wrote a new lyric for the Star Spangled Banner in reaction to the Highland Park shootings in Illinois. So this kind of conversation that's going about significant events, significant moments, significant questions about what it means to be American has been going on for well over 200 years. And one of the interesting things, if you line them up from the earliest one in 1790 to the most recent one in chronological order, if you add them all up, Francis Scott Keyes is not the first one. He's number 136 in my research so far. So he's not starting a conversation in song. He's joining a conversation in song. He's contributing to an ongoing debate in musical lyrics about the future of the nation and what's important. And what he's saying in his lyric is that we need to be more unified. It's a time in 1814 of incredible political division between the federalists and the Democratic Republicans who were for and against the War of 1812. It's a time of sort of disunity militarily where we're not able to defend ourselves. The British fleet has been going up and down the Chesapeake Bay for months during the summer of 1814, harassing towns, asking for ransom of various towns, bombing towns, destroying property, burning the White House to the ground. So insulting sort of American honor. We can't defend ourselves. And Francis Scott Keyes is saying, we need to be stronger. We need to come together as a country so that we can be strong. And he's also saying, for Francis Scott Keyes, who was a lay minister in the Anglican church, that we need to be more pious. So that last line, oh, thus be it, everyone freemen shall stand between their left home and the worst desolation goes to that. Those high notes is about in God is our trust. And that motto that's on our coins is sometimes said to come from Francis Scott Keyes, although I've never seen any direct evidence of that. One thing I can say, however, is that the Star Spangled Banner, that phrase, which refers to this flag right here, this is the Star Spangled Banner from that was flying. This is the same design anyway as the flag that was flying over Fort McHenry, which is now in Washington, D.C. and the Smithsonian Institutions Museum of American History. It's a beautiful exhibit. I'd definitely go check that out if you're there. You walk down these long hallways and your eyes adjust to the really low light that's used to protect the fabric of the flag from deterioration. And anyway, it's just a sacred experience to visit. This is what is really an American relic now, right? It's sacred. But in 1814 it was not sacred. The flag was not a very important patriotic symbol. This particular flag is an interesting design because it has 15 stripes. The flag today has 13 stripes representing colonies and it has 15 stars because it was designed in the late 18th century to reflect the number of states in the Union at the time, which was 15. Well, by the War of 1812 there were 18 states in the United States and no one bothered to put three more stars on the flag because the flag wasn't that important. But I think the War of 1812 as a battle is not that big a deal in American history because, you know, territorially we all go back to the way it was before the war. It's sort of we later become friends with England as this relationship like today. So it's not something that gets a lot of emphasis in American history courses. But in fact, what the most important thing I think that the War of 1812 led to was a feeling of national identity, right? Creating patriotism in a way. And it's the flag and the Star Spangled Banner and actually the character of Uncle Sam is invented in the same time. But the flag becomes more important because of Key Song and the words that we use, the name that we give this flag, the Star Spangled Banner, that phrase comes from Francis Scott Key's lyric. He's the one who invented the name of our flag. And it was the chorus that repeated part of the lyric that gets said by the soloist and then by the community. And that repeated part ended up becoming the title of the song when it was first published in probably in November of 1814, that version we heard earlier today. That was the first time that the title, the Star Spangled Banner was also given to the song. And that's because it was published by a music publisher who wanted to sell a lot of copies. He didn't want to just sell a song about the defense of Fort McHenry. He wanted to sell a song about the United States as a whole. So it's the use of abstract symbols in the lyric of the Star Spangled Banner that really make it possible for it to be a national anthem today, for it to continue as something that we use today rather than a song that's only about one event, like those other 580-some lyrics that we don't remember because they really were topical and they weren't able to transcend time. How did Francis Scott Key come to know the Star Spangled Banner? Well, the way I think he probably heard it first was through a song called Adams and Liberty. This is sometimes called erroneously the first American presidential campaign song. It was actually written after Adams was already elected, our second president. It referred to the quasi-war with France. It was a time of crisis in America, certainly a crisis for John Adams administration and the Federalist Party was really being questioned. They were a pro-British party and this was a war against, sort of an undeclared war against France. It was a time when the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed. So a time of incredible partisan division in the United States, not unlike today. And I'll talk, hopefully we'll have time to talk about the reference in the lyric to the two slaves, which is also in the third verse of the Star Spangled Banner. But this was a very, Adams and Liberty was an incredibly popular song in 1798. It was a Federalist Party song. Francis Scott Key was a member of the Federalist Party. His uncle actually had been elected a congressman from the Federalist Party. So he would have, I think, heard this song as part of his life as an American. He wrote an earlier song, Francis Scott Key did, to the same melody called, When the Warrior Returns. Let's switch slides here. Here we go. Which was written in 1805. So nine years before he's in the Potapska River watching the bombing of Baltimore. Nine years before he writes an earlier song, he uses the same melody to celebrate the heroism of American military members. So this particular song is called When the Warrior Returns. It was written in honor of Charles Stewart and Stephen Decatur, some of the first naval heroes of American history and the tripolitan war. They sort of boarded and then set a flame. The USS Philadelphia would have been captured by the enemy in Tripoli's harbor. And then they came back to the United States. There was dinner in their honor in Georgetown and a young Francis Scott Key, having just moved to the District of Columbia, introduces himself to his future clients, I think, in law by writing this lyric and having it performed. And it's sung to exactly the same melody. So it's When the Warrior Returns from the battle afar. Same tune that we know today as the Star Spangled Banner. An important question that early American lyricists who were writing these other alternate lyrics asked was about the question of freedom. Francis Scott Key intentionally sets the word free. Oh, say does that Star Spangled Banner get way over the land of the free? That's the high note. That's the important note. That's the critical question facing America. Are we free of Britain in the Revolutionary War but also in the War of 1812? So this question of liberty and self autonomy is really essential to American life. And so he important, you know, sets that to the high note. But of course, at this time, slavery was legal in the United States. So one thing that other political lyricists wrote and as I mentioned in 1844, that oh, say do you hear lyric, abolitionists used the association of the melody with Key's lyric and with American heroism to question, ironically, this notion of how can we be a land of the free when millions of Americans are enslaved or held as captive labor. So this was used for many lyrics, actually, questioning slavery, including that oh, say do you hear, which is written by an abolitionist minister here in Michigan, Battle Creek, Michigan in 1844. And then was published not only in Michigan, but then was picked up by William Lloyd Garrison's the liberator and shared nationally. Another really important lyric that was part of this broadside tradition was Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who is an important American poet. Also a physician in February of 1861. So really, even before the shots were fired at Fort Sumter, writes a lyric calling for the end of slavery in the United States. And he writes that lyric using the melody of the Star's Mail Banner. In fact, this was sung as an additional verse at a concert in Boston in order to use it to recruit soldiers for the Union cause to represent the sort of the need to preserve the nation. But this idea of ending slavery, which is often critically debated in American history, but this one thing we find in these lyrics sung to the tune of the Star's Mail Banner is that as early actually as November and December of 1860, there are lyrics sung to the tune of what we now know as the National Anthem that were calling for the end of slavery in the United States. So before the South is seceded, before the first shots had been fired in the Civil War. So the important lines for the high notes that Oliver Wendell Holmes creates are in blue in this slide. By the millions unchained who her birthright have gained. So the birthright as citizenship, as freedom, as humanity. We will keep her bright blaze on. So we'll keep the nation's flag, her bright blaze on, forever unstained. So slavery is represented as a stain on the nation's flag that is going to be washed out by the Civil War. So Francis Scott Key was a slave under himself. His wife was from one of the largest slave-owning families in Maryland. They actually, for a time, possessed legally, at least in terms of the time, Frederick Douglass, the future abolitionist. But interestingly, Francis Scott Key is also a complicated and conflicted character, just like American history. He is also, you know, a person who fought in court in the district courts of the District of Columbia on behalf of Black Americans, suing their owners for freedom. And so he filed over 100 cases, representing Black men, women, and children for their freedom. He won about 30 of those and then won a big important case in the early 1820s, mid-1820s, called the Antelope case, which led to the freedom of 131 people who were illegally imported in the United States to be sold as slaves. And so Francis Scott Key's legal efforts resulted in the freedom of 189 people, at least, that I've been able to track so far. So he also freed the first of the slaves he owned in 1811. So three years before he wrote The Star Spangled Banner and the rest, upon, at other princes' life, he freed six others and then the rest by his last will and testament. So he doesn't, he's sort of an anti-slavery slave owner. I mean, he also really opposed abolition. He prosecuted an abolitionist as part of the District of Columbia, white on Black race riots in 1835. He also prosecuted the white rioters. So he's a complicated character. And I think, again, it's worth knowing about Francis Scott Key because it helps us understand the conflict in American identity of the time. One of the important things that I discovered at the National Archives in College Park was this document. This is Francis Scott Key's deposition that he gave sworn deposition to Congress, testifying for a select committee on the illegal slave trade in the District of Columbia. District of Columbia was one of the most active slave markets in the United States at the time. Slavery was legal in Washington, D.C. And this was an important symbol for the South for places where the slave trade was legal, was that the nation's capital also allowed safe. So the slave trade in D.C. was contested from the very beginning of the nation. These were critical and sort of inflaming ideas. Even at the time that the Constitution was ratified, the word slave is not in the Constitution. They use all sorts of euphemisms about other persons in the Constitution. But this is his deposition, and this is held in the National Archives. It's in a special vault because it has Francis Scott Key's signature on it. But in here he talks about some of the horrors that he thought about the slave trade. One that really bothered him was the separation of families, that kids were taken away from their parents and that husbands and wives were sold separately to different parts of the country. Key had this sort of crazy, fantastical wrong idea that slavery could end peacefully and that no one would get hurt. We needed a civil war to in fact end slavery and it's really the cotton gin that changes the trajectory of slavery. I think earlier in Key's life it might have been reasonable to think maybe slavery would end, especially if you lived in Maryland, which was not a particularly big cotton growing state. But when cotton took over and the cotton gin allowed for cotton production to increase, slavery exploded in the United States and there was a lot more slavery, a lot more speculation, a lot more money in slavery. So in many ways this slavery picked up in the middle half leading inevitably to the civil war. But one of the critical questions, which I'll get into, is the word slave that's in the third verse of Key's original lyric for the defense of Fort Kennery, which later became the national anthem. So this particular word appears in those high notes in the third verse, no refuge could save the hireling and slave from the terror of light or the gloom of the grave. And in my book I explore three possible meanings of this at the time. It certainly strikes anybody today as a problem that the word slave is in Key's lyric. But I think there were three different meanings possible, at least that I've unpacked in my book. One is that what I think probably most white people would have understood in 1814, which is that it actually referred not to real people who were enslaved to black Americans, but rather to the British white soldiers who were vassals of King George. I think abolitionists and African-Americans at the time would have seen this word as evoking the fact that there were real African-Americans who were enslaved in the country. So I think that's a valid interpretation from that perspective. And then what I think actually probably Francis got Key meant, which is slightly more specific. So slave turns out to be a very common word in American patriotic poetry from the Revolutionary War period, and the War of 1812 is a kind of echo, if you will, of the Revolutionary War. It refers to those who were duty bound to a king. So the Revolution was about separating from King George. And so often the British were mocked as slaves of King George. It takes a certain kind of myopia, a certain kind of blindness to human suffering to use the word in this way when there are actual people who are really enslaved at the exact same time. So it's indicative of the kind of dominance of white men in the political system of the United States in 1814. Only white men could vote. If you were black, you couldn't vote. If you were a woman, you couldn't vote. If you were foreign, you couldn't vote. So there are, I think, a lot of issues about American history that we need to understand about ourselves and understanding what at least to some people this word might have meant is helpful. It appears in that really famous song I said from 1798, The Addams in Liberty. The chorus line of that is, And there shall the sons of Columbia be slaves while the earth bears a plant where the sea rolls its way. So remember we're having a war with France, which was undergoing its own revolution, but traditionally it's had a king. We will not let a foreign power take over our country. We will not be slaves to Europe. The sons of Columbia, Columbia, like Columbus discovering, which we know he didn't actually discover America. There were people who were already, but often early American poetry refers to the United States as Columbia as the land of the goddess Columbia. So that's the sons of Columbia are basically the sons of the United States. They're Americans. Again, this reminds us of really the totality of the white male perspective in American politics of this era. Another thing that the abolitionists and black Americans would have understood from the word slave in the lyric is a reference to the colonial Marines. So the colonial Marines were self-liberated or escaped black Americans who volunteered to fight for the British side against America in order to help the British and disrupt the American slave economy. So they were incredible fighters. They're very valuable to the British campaign in the Chesapeake, heroic in their way as well. And they were promised freedom, not necessarily at the price of serving. Many women and children were granted passage to Canada and to the sort of Caribbean islands that were held by Britain as well. So there were many people who've escaped to British ships and then were given freedom going forward. And Britain honored that commitment to them and actually ended up paying reparations to the United States in compensation for the men, women and children who were freed by the war of 1812. And Francis Scott Key's mind, however, I think there's one other little detail that's important, which is that the lyric refers to hireling and slave using the singular forms of the word. So it's the hireling and slave. No refuge could save the hireling and slave. And so it came to me rather late in the process of writing my book as I looked into the question of Francis Scott Key, a board ship having almost no information at the battle, right? There's no radio at this time. There's no tweets. So you don't know what's happening. He only knows what he sees, which is the flag is still flying over the Fort McHenry. One thing he does, however, learn is that also aboard his American true ship is John Stuart Skinner, who's the U.S. agent of prisoners. While they are hanging out after the battle for three days, they're still under British guard. They're not allowed to leave. Partially this is because Skinner is doing work. He's lazing with the British command. He's finding out how many prisoners were taken. He's finding about any American casualties that British have. And so he learns that British General Robert Ross was killed by an American sniper during the battle. And Robert Ross was the sort of symbolic head of the campaign, the sort of the army, the Marine campaign, the soldiers who had burned Washington D.C. to the ground. He was the person who had held William Baines, who was the doctor that Francis Scott Key went to release. That's why he was in Baltimore at all at this time was to negotiate his freedom. And he was really hated by Americans at the time. And he was killed by a sniper in the battle of Baltimore and what's called the Battle of North Point as they were approaching Baltimore. And then he, in order to give him life-saving medical attention, was actually put on a litter dragged behind a horse back to the shore over miles and in order to try to give him medical attention, but he died along the way. So I think it's possible that for Francis Scott Key, when he says no refuge could save the hireling and slave, he says no refuge could save Major General Robert Ross from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave because he was the guy who died and he was the guy who had this harrowing journey back to the ships as he was dying. So, you know, Francis Scott Key writing a lyric, his own sense of sort of elite propriety would not allow him to mention an insult Major General Ross by name, I don't think. So he refers to him sort of obliquely and maybe unfortunately using the word slave. So I think pretty convinced that this is what Francis Scott Key was thinking because if he was writing a lyric to try to unify the country, talking about the word, evoking a word that was so divisive in America and Francis Scott Key because he had fought on behalf of black Americans in court. I mean, he knew that slavery was a divisive term. So to reference that a term of division while in a song for unity doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So strangely enough, I think this term was probably not experienced by a lot of people who heard the first versions of the Star Spangled Banner as referencing actually enslaved people. But I do think that one of the things that we could do as a country is to add some detail to the 1931 bill that names the Star Spangled Banner and the National Anthem in the United States. Currently that bill just says, it's very short, it's like one sentence long, it says, the words in music known as the Star Spangled Banner is the National Anthem in the United States of America. I mean, for me, what makes the Star Spangled Banner into the Anthem is really the U.S. Civil War. That's what makes the song sacred, but it's the bill that makes it official. And there's no text specified. So one of the things we should do is officially remove the third verse from the text of the Star Spangled Banner, which actually happened as early as school textbooks and church hymnals during the Civil War. And U.S. government versions of the Star Spangled Banner, like some of the translations I found in the National Archive and to all sorts of different languages in Spanish and to Indonesian, they don't have the third verse. And so I think it's fair to say that it shouldn't be there, and we should, as a gesture of inclusion to make everybody feel welcomed or included in the Star Spangled Banner, remove the third verse. Because regardless of what it might have meant to Francesca Key or to some people in this thinking, white-dominated thinking of 1814, it doesn't mean that to people today. And so in recognition of that, I think we should officially remove the Star Spangled Banner's third verse, the defense of our country, the original lyrics, third verse to really, I think, make it clear that we're a country of many different kinds of people today and that Black Americans are vital in part of this history, that they are Americans. So I've got a couple of questions in the chat here. So if you have any, please post those. And my friends working at the National Archive, we'll share those with me. But one is, was the call and response structure at the end of the anachronistic song, the end of the initial Star Spangled Banner, was that common? Yes, it was. And in fact, you could do the same thing with Yankee Doodle. But these early melodies were often used for American politics. And so you would basically make a statement about your candidate or your partner's idea and then the form of the song by having the crowd that's at the political dinner or at the parade echo back. The chorus line would reinforce that meaning. So you'd say, let's go vote for Thomas Jefferson. Everybody would say, I'm going to go vote for Thomas Jefferson. And they'd reprint that back. So it was a way of sort of the call and response was a way of making a political call and fostering agreement with the community and sort of sort of builds community. And I think that's what the Francis Guy Key hoped his song would do is build community, would unify America, would get over the political division of 1814. I don't think he was hoping that he would write a national anthem. Like, nobody would have thought that. I mean, he would be stunned to know that we're still singing his song today, that it's still controversial, that people still fight over the words and how it should be performed. And I think that's actually in some ways a sort of magical that music means that much to us as Americans. So I'm on one hand very excited about that but I think for Francis Guy Key, he was celebrating the heroism of one moment in American history, of one group of Americans in part to inspire future generations of Americans, other Americans to do heroic things. And actually there's, in my book, it's framed at the beginning of the end by an anecdote about the one time that Francis Guy Key talked about the Star Spangled Banner. He was pretty, he never left like a memories or an essay about how he wrote the anthem. And that's part of why I needed to write the book is because there's a lot of confusion around how it got written because he didn't write it down. So there's no firsthand account. There's just other people talking about what Francis Guy Key told them, supposedly after Francis Guy Key died in 1843. So that's why there's so much misinformation or one of the reasons. But what Francis Guy Key says in the speech in the 1830s is that America needs to continue to do heroic things to inspire American poets to write new songs. So he actually, he calls himself for new anthems, for new patriotic songs. And for me, I think one of the things that I think would strengthen our civic rituals in the United States might be to take Francis Guy Key at his word, to write new songs or to use some of the other songs of American history in this ritual moment in patriotic, you know, displays. So say the beginning of football games. Say if during the football season, what professional football, they play like 17 games, right? So what if you had the Star Spangled Banner every other game and in between you played America Beautiful or, you know, God Bless America or Lift of your Waston Sing or other songs, right? So there are many other patriotic songs in the American Repertory. And we could, I think, celebrate our musical diversity and different moments in American history, different moments of heroism with different songs and maybe treat the National Anthem or at least that ritual spot. I'm not suggesting changing the National Anthem but treat that spot as a place of possibility rather than a place of just repetition. For me, there is value in retaining the Star Spangled Banner. I mean, some people ask me, like I think the National Anthem should be America Beautiful and indeed it's a beautiful song. I think it's a great peacetime anthem for the nation but at times of crisis, times of war, historically, the Star Spangled Banner has been the song that galvanized Americans to heroic sacrifice and I think that needs to be honored as well. Many military veterans I know, they feel very deeply about the Star Spangled Banner because it represents their commitment, their willingness to sacrifice for the nation and historically that's how the song has functioned and war has really been the thing that made the Anthem sacred, I think in American life, made it a sacred symbol of nation. So I think there's value in retaining it even with the complexity of who Francis Scott Key was as a slave owner, as a lawyer representing black Americans in court because it tells the messy story of American history. I mean, American history is not a straight line to justice. It's a crisis after crisis story of Americans debating and arguing about what justice means and I think it's no less relevant today than it was in 1814 and for me that reminder of history that we have a national anthem that highlights the word free, that highlights this fundamental idea of everybody having the independence to be the best that they can be and for me equality is a corollary of freedom. You can't have freedom without equality. So I think it leads to a kind of patriotism that is really, really helpful. I'm gonna actually stop the share as I wrap up here, but it leads to a kind of patriotism that's enormously healthy for the nation and so the fact that our anthem reminds us of our ideals and that when we feel uncomfortable with the anthem, when the anthem brings to the fore a kind of dissonance in American society that maybe not everybody is being served equally by the country, that that is kind of alarm bell for me. When Colin Kaepernick knelt for example, that was an alarm bell that was saying not that the song was bad, but that it was the song was a platform for protest was to be able to use the song as a way of calling attention to injustice and to trying to hold the nation to its ideals that we live up to the ideal of freedom that's celebrated in the anthem and for me that final question, oh say does that star spangled banner yet wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave, do we have the courage, are we brave enough to be free, to have the responsibility of freedom and for me ultimately that's why the star spangled banner is a living anthem that tells us not only what it meant to be American in the past but that challenges us to be the best Americans we can today and going forward. So I want my students, I want young people, I want all Americans to see patriotism and protest, to see the anthem as something that can be plural. It's not just one static icon of the past but it's actually a living practice of the future. Thanks so much to the National Archive for hosting this talk today. It's been a real joy to talk to with you and I hope you enjoyed this musical tour through the history of Francis Scott Key's Star Spangled Banner and please read my book, oh say can you hear a cultural biography of the Star Spangled Banner. It has a lot more detail about all these other lyrics and the history of the music and the use of the Star Spangled Banner in different translations and for protests and great performances and I hope you find the story of the Star Spangled Banner as fascinating as I do.