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Every few years, someone suggests replacing the Star
Spangled Banner
as the national anthem, on several
grounds:
1. It is not an ancient national tradition like the flag it celebrates; its quasi-sacred status was not official until March 3, 1931.
2. Its melody ranges from B flat below middle C to the F above high C. That's an octave and a half, which is more than most voices can comfortably span.
3. We like to consider ourselves a peace-loving nation,
yet our anthem bristles with martial phrases like bombs
bursting in air
and Then conquer we must.
4. Although Francis Scott Key's lyrics are safely
American, the tune comes from John Stafford Smith, an
Englishman who originally wrote it for an off-color
drinking ballad called To Anacreon in Heaven.
(While we're criticizing official music, we should
demand that our state song be changed. I am among the
millions of Coloradans who has never heard Where the
Columbines Grow.
What's the use of having a state song
if nobody ever plays it? It's so obscure that in a whole
bookcase of Coloradana, I can see that Rio Blanco county
shipped 5,484 tons of coal in 1937, and that the Agua
Caliente hot spring in Conejos County produces 50 gallons
per minute of 90-degree water -- but I can't find the music
or lyrics for Where the Columbines Grow,
which was
written by Dr. Arthur J. Fynn, a Denver educator, and
adopted as the state song on May 8, 1915.)
It would not be right to criticize the Star Spangled
Banner
without suggesting a replacement. My Country
'Tis of Thee
has the same tune as the British anthem,
so it would cause no little confusion at the Olympics when
they strike up the winner's national anthem.
Many people favor America the Beautiful,
allegedly inspired by the view from the summit of Pike's
Peak, but it is rather fanciful; have you ever seen an
alabaster city
or fruited plain?
Last weekend, I mentioned this anthem problem to a
professional musician whose goes by Papa J Hammond.
He suggested Johnny B. Goode.
It is rock 'n' roll,
America's invention and most potent export -- most
recently, the music that brought down opera-loving Gen.
Noriega. It's a heart-warming American tale of upward
mobility, and it was among the songs put on the Voyager
spacecraft to tell extra-terrestrials of significant human
accomplishments.
I pointed out that there's a political problem, in that Chuck Berry has again run afoul of the War on Drugs.
So we settled on Louie, Louie
as the best
candidate for the new national anthem. Every band knows how
to play it. People love to dance to it, so Americans would
eagerly exhibit patriotism and stand when the anthem was
played. Nobody knows what the words are, so nobody could
complain about the lyrics. And even Roseanne Barr couldn't
mess it up.
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