Listen here (audio, and inspiration for this post, via the National Museum of American History). It's based off an 18th-century British pub song called "To Anacreon in Heaven." That's right: a song to be sung whilst drunk.
The composition, argued the Music Supervisors National Conference in 1930 (now the National Association for Music Education), "was too difficult a musical composition to be rendered properly by schoolchildren, informal gatherings and public meetings where the singing of the national anthem appropriate," according to a 1930 New York Times article.Īlthough Francis Scott Key penned the words in 1814 during the War of 1812, the melody is actually much older. Even before Congress declared "The Star-Spangled Banner" the official anthem of the United States in 1931, its complicated melody and soaring pitches were controversial.
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