When I was writing my book on the intertwined histories of “This Land Is Your Land” and “God Bless America,” I had five days for archival research in New York City and Washington, DC. I scheduled them as best I could: The Woody Guthrie Archives, which was then in Mount Kisko, NY (a couple hours north of New York City); different departments of the Library of Congress; the folk music archive at the Smithsonian Museum; meetings with Guthrie and Berlin’s publishers. And every day, archivists, whose attitude ranged from dedicated to enthusiastic, handed me things that rocked my understanding of what I was looking into. It was a trip – a trip and a half!
I saw and I heard:
Beautiful, unpublished, hippie-trippy lyrics that Guthrie wrote for “This Land Is Your Land.”
A pencil draft of the original melody of “God Bless America,” strikingly and tellingly different than the final.
Two different demos of Guthrie singing unheard lyrics of “This Land Is Your Land” – with a different, and lovely, melody.
Long out-of-print songbooks Guthrie typed up and mimeographed, one of which he sold over the radio when he was a local radio musician in Los Angeles in the late 1930s, with comments full of Guthrie’s characteristic wit, whimsy, and insight – and his uncharacteristic and later renounced racism.
An unreleased radio recording of an Armed Services performance of “God Bless America” on the morning that the Marines shipped out from Hawai’i to launch the assault on Iwo Jima during the Second World War, with vivid and moving commentary by a US Marines radio announcer.
Unreleased radio performances of Guthrie songs, sung by Guthrie and others.
I had a fantastic cache of exciting stuff – astonishingly, previously unpublished – to use when I wrote my book, This Land That I Love: Irving Berlin, Woody Guthrie, and the Story of Two American Anthems, which was published ten years ago last week. I dug into histories of folk music, nationalism, and national anthems, which, to my surprise, all shared 18th-century roots. But still, none of this was the most startling thing I came across.
“The Story of Two American Anthems” wasn’t my idea for the subtitle. I wanted to call it, “The Story of America’s National Anthems,” because the book digs into most of the famous ones, going back to “Yankee Doodle.” The publisher suggested the change, and I, being meek and inexperienced, didn’t stand up for my preference. I could see how people might think from the subtitle I wanted, that I thought Berlin and Guthrie’s contributions were America’s national anthems, period; but, from the reviews, it seems some people were caught off guard by the breadth of the study.
They’re all fascinating stories. “America the Beautiful” – full of visionary passages and intense critiques of unbridled capitalism, and written by Katharine Lee Bates, a socialist and possible (or probable?) lesbian. The Pledge of Allegiance, written by a socialist and Christian minister (Francis Bellamy) who didn’t include God in it; Cold War politicians added God to the Pledge in the 1950s. “America,” written by another minister, Samuel Francis Smith, and, like “This Land” and “America the Beautiful,” redolent with a vision of American freedom emanating from the landscape. “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a/k/a the Negro National Anthem, written by two brilliant and fascinating brothers, James Weldon Johnson (words) and J. Rosamond Johnson (music), and echoing with imagery and melodic grace inspired by the spirituals. And, most topsy-turvy of all, “Yankee Doodle,” a song with a career too busy to capture in a sentence. All of them reflecting their times and places, all of them part of the American story, the American tapestry.
I hadn’t known about Bates’s socialism when I started; the most famous book about “America the Beautiful” hadn’t mentioned it, and I only learned it from reading English History Told by English Poets, an anthology of poetry she co-edited and published in 1902 with her housemate and travel companion of 25 years, until death parted them, fellow Wellesley professor Katharine Coman. (Bates was an English professor, Coman a professor of economics and statistics.) I fantasized that compiling the information that three of America’s most-beloved patriotic artefacts – The Pledge of Allegiance, “America the Beautiful,” and “This Land Is Your Land” – had been written by socialists, would have affected the national conversation, but nope.
More shocking than the pervasive influence of socialists on our patriotic imagery, though, is the story behind “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
It’s well known that Francis Scott Key wrote the lyric to an English song called “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Typically characterized as “a drinking song,” “To Anacreon in Heaven” was the club song of an 18th-Century London gentleman’s musical association, the Anacreontick Society. The famed Austrian composer Franz Josef Haydn was a guest of honor once in the 1790s. Not exactly a drinking song, though the lyric enthusiastically endorses alcohol – and not just alcohol, but sex. At the end of the verse, where Americans sing, “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave,” the Anacreontick Society sang, in the voice of Anacreon, “And then I’ll instruct you, like me, to intwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine.”
I’d read the poetry of Anacreon, in translation, and I recalled him as being something other than – or more than – a poet of “wine, women, and song”; I remembered him as being a celebrant of same-sex love, as other Ancient Greek lyric poets had famously been. I pulled my volume of Greek lyric poetry from the shelf (in Diane Rayor’s translation) and confirmed my memory. Love poetry to teenage boys.
Remembering that the history of translation from Greek was spotty, I went searching. I wondered whether 18th-Century Europeans might have been unaware of Anacreon’s sexual desire for teenage boys.
What I found was even trippier. It turned out that an accurate text of the surviving fragments of Anacreon wasn’t available in Western Europe until later in the 19th century. But it turned out not to matter. A corpus of poems attributed to Anacreon, but now thought not to have been written by him, did circulate in those years, and people thought it was genuine Anacreon. And – the poems had imagery more starting than love poems to teenage boys. Pseudo-Anacreon wrote, in a poem in which the poet instructs a painter to paint a portrait of a teenage boy he desires, “shape a bold member / already desiring.”
So.
The tune of the official national anthem of the United States was originally written in honor of a poet who wrote poetry praising a teenage boy’s erection.
O Say Can You See WHAT?
It’s not as if people didn’t know this in the 19th century, nor that they didn’t object to it. The Irish songwriter Thomas Moore wrote in his 1800 preface to his collection of translations of [pseudo-]Anacreon (in a passage I didn’t use in my book):
“The amours of the poet . . . I shall pass over in silence; and there are few, I presume, who will regret the omission of most of those anecdotes, which the industry of some editors has not only promulged, but discussed. Whatever is repugnant to modesty and virtue is considered in ethical science, by a supposition very favourable to humanity, as impossible; and this amiable persuasion should be much more strongly entertained, where the transgression wars with nature as well as virtue.” – Thomas Moore, “Remarks on Anacreon,” an introduction to Odes of Anacreon: Translated Into English Verse, with Notes, London, 1800, p. 7.
Transgressions warring with nature: gay desire, presumably.
I felt like I had done nothing more complicated than putting 2 and 2 together – Anacreon's work was widely available, and anybody who looked into it knew that Francis Scott Key wrote the lyric to the tune in Anacreon’s honor. And yet nobody to my knowledge had written about Anacreon’s poetry in connection with our national anthem. I again fantasized that the publication of the scandalous roots of “The Star-Spangled Banner” would affect the national conversation somehow, but nobody blinked. None of the reviews even mentioned it, and some reviewers complained about the "unprofitable” digressions from the main subjects of Guthrie and Berlin’s songs. (“Unprofitable,” I must confess, still rankles. I suspect that some of the reviewers skimmed the book hastily and missed some, um, “profitable” stuff.)
Looking back, there are some things I’d write differently. I missed opportunities and misjudged some things; for instance, I didn’t write about the deeper moral scandal of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which is that third stanza celebrates hunting down people who have escaped from slavery. And there’s at least one significant factual error. Still, I was a lucky kid, that I got to write the thing and that PublicAffairs published it. Learned a ton and had a blast. To quote Ira Gershwin, a lyricist who once referred to Irving Berlin as “the songwriter,” who could ask for anything more?