Star Strangled Banner
Marvin Gaye remixed it, Roseanne mangled it. America has an anthem—but which version represents us?
When Trisha Yearwood steps to the mic before tonight’s Game One of the World Series, I will be on edge, wondering where this rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” will fit into the checkered history of that song.
As with NFL games, artists are allowed to lipsync, and there may be reasons for them to prefer it. That’s what Whitney Houston did at the 1991 Super Bowl, and such stars as Diana Ross, Barry Manilow, and Neil Diamond have done the same.
Tonight’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner” may be different from the one we’re used to. During the 1968 World Series, Jose Feliciano was pilloried when he performed a languid, Latin version of the national anthem. Times have changed — Feliciano performed the same version at baseball games in 2010 and 2012 without incident.
One thing we know going in, the artist will not be Carl Lewis or Roseanne Barr. At a 1993 NBA game between the Chicago Bulls and the New Jersey Nets, Olympic track champion Carl Lewis made the song unrecognizable—ESPN anchor Charley Steiner described Lewis’s rendition as having “been written by Francis Scott Off Key.” Lewis did accomplish something no one else had ever done: he made Michael Jordan uncomfortable on a basketball court.
In 1990, Roseanne Barr opened a San Diego Padres baseball game with a double-time version that was done as a joke, sounding like a thirteen-year-old girl getting drunk at a slumber party and thinking it’s cool. Roseanne Barr was crucified in the media and Carl Lewis, who was trying to launch a singing career, was mocked relentlessly and never taken seriously, even as an athlete, again.
Traditionally, there is usually a heavy military presence during the singing of “The Star Spangled Banner.” It may be just a color guard or, more likely, fighter jets screaming overhead. This comes as no surprise given the militaristic origins of the song. I am a big sports fan—my son and I have traveled to all over the South several times just to watch high school football games (and eat barbecue). I am also a combat Vietnam Veteran, and those displays of military muscle always make me uneasy. I am more eager than the other fans in the stadium or in front of the TV for the anthem to end and the game to start.
Where did this song come from anyway? During the War of 1812, a young lawyer and plantation owner named Francis Scott Key had a friend who had been arrested by the British and who was being kept on the flagship of the British fleet on Chesapeake Bay. Key managed to convince the British to release his friend, but since he had knowledge of an impending British assault on the city of Baltimore, he was not allowed to leave the ship. The attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor began on September 13, 1814 and went on for over 24 hours.
When Key saw “by the dawn’s early light” that the American flag was still flying over the fort, he knew the British had been defeated. This inspired him to write a poem called “The Star Spangled Banner,” which he set to the tune of a bawdy British drinking song. The song was reprinted in newspapers across the country and struck a nerve because only a few weeks earlier the British had set Washington D.C. ablaze, burning the Capitol, the Treasury, and the White House.
As a result of the song’s popularity, the U.S. flag acquired a name, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This served to help to knit together the fractious group of former British colonies into a nation—the United States. The process wasn’t complete until after the Civil War, when for the first time the U.S. truly became one nation with one flag. One nation, but with very important exceptions. At the time the last lines of “The Star Spangled Banner” were written, this wasn’t “the land of the free and the home of the brave” for the over one million Africans being held as slaves in the United States. The Civil War freed the slaves but only to deliver them into the oppression of sharecropping.
Understandably, ex-slaves who weren’t free came to feel a need for their own anthem. After Reconstruction, James Weldon Johnson and his brother John Roseamond Johnson wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” first performed in public at the segregated Stanton School in Jacksonville in 1900 for a celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Singing this song became a common way for blacks to speak out against Jim Crow, especially the wave of lynchings after the turn of the century (“We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered”).
Given the segregation of America, it was inevitable that those two anthems would be segregated from each other too, seldom crossing musical paths. But the possibility was always there and, in 2008, Denver-based jazz singer Rene Marie made it happen. The genesis of her remix came when she had been performing in Russia in 2005 and was surprised when, during an interview there, she was referred to as an American and realized she didn’t feel like one.
She felt that way because that “even at such a young age I sensed on a fundamental level that there was a disconnect between the patriotic songs I loved to sing and the humiliating, not-quite-a-citizen experiences that black folks were enduring on a daily basis.”
On the other hand, she wrote, “I thought about how, from the time I was a very young child, I had always loved singing ‘America the Beautiful’, ‘God Bless America,’ and how my heart always swelled with pride, how I always teared up whenever I heard the beginning strains of the National Anthem. I loved these songs, loved singing them.”
In May of 2008, Rene Marie sang the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” combined with the melody of the National Anthem at the Colorado Prayer Luncheon. Despite the fact that she had been specifically asked to sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” she received praise from many of the political leaders assembled there. Howie Grapek of Blacktie Colorado described her performance as “amazing.” Several weeks later Rene Marie stepped to the mic at the annual State of the City speech by Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. Again she had been asked to sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” but again she substituted the lyrics for “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” But this time it wasn’t a private event like the Prayer Breakfast. When Rene Marie made the same lyrical switch at the very public mayor’s event, the sharks smelled media blood.
Within hours, Councilman Charlie Brown took to local talk radio to blast Rene Marie. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. called her actions disrespectful; Mayor John Hickenlooper accused her of deceiving the city for the purpose of a political statement.” Barack Obama, perhaps reading the political tea leaves a month before the Democratic National Convention which would nominate him, told the Rocky Mountain News that “ ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ is a beautiful song, but we only have one national anthem.” Obama defended the aesthetics of the song but ignored its history and its meaning.
These responses were mild compared to the emails and calls Rene Marie received that were filled with racial slurs and death threats. “Some of the emails say that ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ is sacred,” she added. “Oh, really? Maybe it’s sacred to you. That’s fine, that’s cool. But it’s not sacred to me. The dude who wrote it was a slave owner.”
A few days later, Hickenlooper seemingly softened his first comments by adding that “I’m disappointed that this matter has been a distraction from the great work and significant accomplishments of our city employees over the past year and the many important initiatives on tap for the coming year.”
Rene Marie’s song choice served as an implicit critique of the mayor’s initiatives, especially because our National Anthem comes with a built-in agenda. The relentless promotion of “The Star Spangled Banner” has reinforced a false picture of America by ignoring the inequality that defines our country and the power relationships which keep it that way.
Above all, the song burns acceptance of war into our brains as an instrument of national policy. This began with the first high-profile performance of the National Anthem at the 1918 World Series. Before the first game began, “The Star Spangled Banner” was played while the players went through military drills on the field, marching with bats on their shoulders to simulate rifles.
The need of our bipartisan war machine for unthinking support was so intense that even musical changes in the national anthem were taboo. When Jose Feliciano did that first remix of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Game Five of the 1968 World Series in Detroit, the idea that a Puerto Rican would presume to take liberties with the Anthem provoked a firestorm of protest. “I felt bad about the controversy because they stopped playing my songs on American radio stations,” Feliciano said later.
A year later, at the height of the Vietnam War and urban rebellions, Jimi Hendrix took the stage at Woodstock. His band was the last to go on—they didn’t perform until eight in the morning. Most of the crowd was gone by then, but it didn’t matter. He performed a version of “The Star Spangled Banner” that was angry and intense, drenched in feedback and distortion. Hendrix later said he meant to convey that “we’re all Americans… we play it the way the air is in America.”
The efforts of Feliciano and Hendrix opened the door to further anthemic creativity. Marvin Gaye’s version at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game, in which he looked and sounded like the coolest guy in the building, was so good that it was released as a single.
In 1984, the Temptations had the same gig and took it to church, and at the 1986 All-Star Game, country singer B.J. Thomas made “The Star Spangled Banner” into a chilling backwoods moan. At a 2005 middleweight fight in Las Vegas, R. Kelly delivered a lilting reggae/soul version that had people dancing. None of these versions occasioned any outcry—the rigid mold for “The Star Spangled Banner” had been broken. As long as there was no message being sent, no critique of America being made, it was OK to take liberties with the song.
On the eve of the 2006 immigration marches across the United States, a new version of the National Anthem got massive airplay on Spanish-language stations across the country. Retitled “Nuestro Himno,” it featured Latin pop instrumentation with Spanish vocals by Ivy Queen, Gloria Trevi, Carlos Ponce, Olga Tanon, Aventura, and Wyclef Jean. References to bombs and rockets were removed, and the second stanza was rewritten to include lines such as “we are equal, we are brothers.” A hip-hop remix was issued a month later with the following rap: “Let’s not start a war / With all these hard workers / They can’t help where they were born.”
“Nuestro Himno” echoed Hendrix in insisting that we’re all Americans. It was widely attacked, dismissed as “The Illegal Alien Anthem” by those who evidently just hadn’t noticed the way the air is in America. President George W. Bush said, “I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English. And they ought to learn to sing the Anthem in English.”
As long as our beautiful home is marred by racial and economic inequality, we will never be united on the national anthem. A movement to deal with these inequities, from Occupy to Ferguson, is percolating across the country. As this movement grows, it will create many opportunities to sing anthems official and unofficial, songs that are loud and songs that are soft, songs that are traditional and songs that are brand spanking new. Let’s put ‘em all in rotation.
Lee Ballinger is the Associate Editor of Rock & Rap Confidential
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