Shouldn’t a great county like America have a great national anthem? Ours is among the world’s worst.
Not every country can have as stirring a national anthem as France’s “La Marseillaise” or Norway’s prideful “Ja, Vi Elsker.” And we can certainly do better than one whose tune is based on a drinking song – an enemy drinking song, at that (at least in Revolutionary times) – a long-forgotten melody entitled “To Anacreon in Heaven.” And who was “Anacreon”? He was a Greek lyric poet who allegedly met his end when he choked to death on a grape seed at the age of 85. Our undeservedly beloved “Star-Spangled Banner” goes downhill from there.
There are many accusations against our national anthem, and it is guilty on every count. We need go no further than the oft-heard complaint that “The Star-Spangled Banner” is virtually impossible to sing. For one thing, there’s its range of an octave and a half, which is too wide for the average singer. Then there’s the complexity of the lyrics, which begets the matter of the mental laziness exhibited by those who either never learned or forget the words, especially those singers who can’t seem to grasp the term “o’er” (a contraction of “over”) and instead render it, in its two appearances in the first stanza, as “for.”
And O how our fifth-grade teacher struggled to teach us how to sing that penultimate lyric “O’er the land of the free”! It seems we instinctively assigned only one note to the word “free.” Instead, Miss Andrews kept insisting that word required an uptick so that it became “the la-and of the freeEEEE!” And that just made that line, already a nightmare of multi-syllabication, even more difficult.
No wonder some have said that singing, “O say does that Star-Spangled Ba-a-ne-er ye-et wa-ave, o’er the la-and of the freeEEEE, and the home – of the – brave?” is a battle comparable to the one fought in 1814 at Fort McHenry, which the song commemorates!
OK, then. Suppose our hit job on “The Star-Spangled Banner” succeeds and consensus is reached that we need a new national anthem – how then do we salute the greatest nation in song? Whenever this topic comes up on talk radio, the big vote-getter seems to be “God Bless America” by Irving Berlin, and that’s not a bad suggestion. It salutes the Almighty and notes our richness in oceans, prairies and, of course, the Light from Above!
I have long nursed a different challenger, however. It’s admittedly a dark horse, but among all the existing alternatives that I know of, it is the only one that I can truly say inspires me and propels me into the right kind of tears. It’s a song from the early part of the last century that does the job for me quite nicely.
The name of the song, at the moment, is “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” That’s outdated. “Columbia” was an earlier nickname for the United States of America, before the name conjured a frightfully left-wing university and (spelled differently: “Colombia”) a major source of cocaine from South America. So, let’s change the name of the song to “America, the Gem of the Ocean”!
The one verse that elevates me to a patriotic sizzle goes as follows:
Thy mandates make heroes assemble
When liberty’s form stands in view.
Thy banners make tyranny tremble
When borne by the red, white and blue.
Too bad you can’t hear the melody, but the rest of that verse goes predictably as follows:
Three cheers for the red, white and blue.
Three cheers for the red, white and blue.
Thy banners make tyranny tremble
When borne by the red, white and blue.
I was a good friend of Irving Berlin, who gave us “God Bless America,” and I like to think Berlin himself would nominate “America, the Gem of the Ocean” on grounds that all kinds of countries have oceans and mountains and prairies and wish to be blessed by God. However, only America has the power to make tyranny tremble. I look with pride upon the tyrants that have trembled and fallen before America’s might.
Meanwhile, though, better a bum anthem in a great nation than a great anthem in a rotten nation!
