Riffing on ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is a controversial and thoroughly American tradition
From exiles to immigrants to rock gods, we make the song our own
The national anthem is the closest thing our country has to a secular hymn. Because of that, public performances of the song can be loaded events, with both artist and audience playing their own ideas of what it means to be American off of each other. In a democracy as large and messy as ours, the anthem is a kind of living document always open to change and interpretation, and that can make for some pretty electric performances.
The first recorded confluence of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and pro sports was in Chicago during the 1918 World Series. It’s probably not a coincidence that American forces had joined World War I just a little over a year earlier, with over 100,000 American dead at that point, and that the struggle for organized labor had reached such a violent fever pitch that the International Workers of the World set off a bomb in the Chicago Federal Building the day before the series began.
These things were more than just backdrops to the performance of the song. They were the very issues that the song was being performed in reaction to. From its earliest 20th century public performances, the “Star-Spangled Banner” was more than just a somber anthem to be reverently performed in cookie-cutter fashion with hand over heart. It’s been something more like a barometer, changing with the mood and course of the nation. A radically democratic canvas that has been tweaked and altered by a succession of performers who each contributed a unique vision of their country.
To be perfectly honest, “The Star-Spangled Banner” isn’t a great pick for a public song or National Anthem. For one, there are too many lyrics. The song’s too long. Most people, if they have any of the anthem memorized, usually stick to the first few verses. Even professionals have trouble remembering the words.
And the music is too complicated as well. Well, not exactly complicated, but definitely out of range for most amateur singers. The Kennedy Center website says, “Some Americans complain that it celebrates war and should be reserved for military ceremonies. Others simply grumble that it is too hard to sing with a range that is out of reach for the average vocalist. Suggested replacements have included ‘America the Beautiful,’ ‘God Bless America,’ and ‘This Land is Your Land.’” A complicated, weird song that’s difficult to perform note for note is just begging to be reinvented, even without the political weight behind it.
Such reinventions began early. Storied American bandleader John Philip Sousa kicked off the tradition by rearranging the tune in what New Yorker music critic Alex Ross calls “the manner of [Wagner’s] the Tannhäuser Overture.” Kind of an odd way to remold the anthem — to filter a popular song through the aesthetics of a German Romantic and then back into popular brass band — but as Sousa said in 1899, “Wagner was a brass band man, anyway.”
For Igor Stravinsky, one of the most talented avant-garde composers of the 20th century, messing with tradition was in his bones. And so when he arranged the anthem himself in 1944, he couldn’t resist adding his own idiosyncratic touch — a dominant seventh chord. The change might be subtle to the amateur ear, but there were definitely repercussions for Igor, who composed the arrangement while he was conductor of the Boston Symphony. As Dan Coleman of Open Culture explains, “the Boston police, not exactly an organization with avant-garde sensibilities, issued Stravinsky a warning, claiming there was a law against tampering with the national anthem. (They were misreading the statute.) Grudgingly, Stravinsky pulled it from the bill.”
Decades later in 1968, blind Puerto Rican American folk singer José Feliciano performed the song during the World Series in Detroit. It’s a beautifully warm and heartfelt rendition, conveying a deep love that, frankly, doesn’t exist in the song as it exists on paper. As Feleciano himself explained, “I had set out to sing an anthem of gratitude to a country that had given me a chance,that had allowed me, a blind kid from Puerto Rico — a kid with a dream — to reach far above my own limitations.” Unfortunately, an immigrant kid putting his own personal spin on the anthem was too much for some people. After the performance Feleciano learned that “a great controversy was exploding across the country because I had chosen to alter my rendition…. Veterans, I was being told, had thrown their shoes at the television as I sang; others questioned my right to stay in the United States.” His beautiful rendition was unintentionally controversial.
The single most famous national anthem performance is probably Jimi Hendrix’s psyche-out feedback-laced rendition performed at Woodstock. It isn’t just one of the most iconic performance of that particular song — it’s one of the most iconic performances of any song, ever. Channeling the spirit of Walt Whitman, Hendrix seems to gesture wildly in two directions at once, containing all the contradictions between deep sorrow and profound joy. It sounds like America screaming at itself. Every note at once a tear, a laugh, and an apology. As the rock critic Greil Marcus writes, “At the very least, Woodstock was proof that America was still big enough to contradict itself on the grandest scale — to stage its best possible spectacle as if to cancel its worst. On those almost instantly legendary three days, there were nearly as many Americans at Woodstock as there were in Vietnam.” Hendrix’s anthem was the perfect synecdoche for that moment in time — a new generation laying claim to their America.
Though not as beautiful as Hendrix’s performance, Roseanne Barr’s 1990 butchering of the “Banner” is also an important moment for the song. Sung at an untelevised San Diego Padres game, her version was what The Washington Post called “the most viral moment of the pre-viral age,” with her off-key belting, fingers in ears, and crotch grabbing garnering a condemnation from then-President George H.W. Bush himself.
Roseanne claims that she intended to sing the song straight, but started in too high a register so doubled down on making it funny. She is a comedian, after all. She called the event a watershed moment, from when she went from being a universally loved figure to completely despised by the public. “I started too high,” Roseanne told The Washington Post, “I knew about six notes in that I couldn’t hit the big note. So I just tried to get through it, but I couldn’t hear anything with 50,000 drunk a — — booing, screaming ‘you fat [expletive],’ giving me the finger and throwing bottles at me during the song they ‘respect’ so much.” Roseanne’s performance is interesting for what it reveals not just about her politics but about how the blowback from a performance is just as much a form of political theater. Just ask Colin Kaepernick.
