WHO FIRST SANG THE UNITED STATES' NATIONAL ANTHEM?
A lawyer named Francis Scott Key and a man named John S. Skinner were given permission by President James Madison during the War of 1812 to communicate with the British in an effort to have a prisoner named William Beanes released from a warship in Chesapeake Bay. Permission was granted, but the men couldn't immediately leave the area where a bombardment was shaping up.
British ships moved in to attack and bombed Fort McHenry, the military location designed to protect the city of Baltimore, Md. Three Americans were on a U.S. prisoner exchange boat to the rear of the British fleet. One of them was a Washington, D.C., lawyer named Frances Scott Key.
The big bombardment started on Tuesday, Sept. 13, 1814, and continued most of the day and into the night. The Americans knew Fort McHenry didn't have too much to defend it.
At 7 o'clock the next morning, as the mist cleared, the Americans saw that the flag was still flying over the walls of the fort. Key, a very patriotic and sensitive man, became excited at the sight and wanted to express his feelings. On the back of an unfinished letter in his pocket he started writing verses to a poem.
In just a few minutes, Key wrote most of the words that were to become the country's national anthem. Later in the day the British released the Americans and they returned to Baltimore where Key finished the last stanzas to "The Star Spangled Banner.''
The morning after the poem was written, handbills containing the inspiring words were printed and distributed in the city. Two days later an actor by the name of Ferdinand Durang sang the words in Baltimore to the tune of an old English drinking song called " To Anacreon in Heaven.''
The melody was known to Americans as a military march of the 1700s and as a political song named "Adams and Liberty."
Durang's singing of "The Star Spangled Banner" just a few days after it was written marked the first time it was performed in public. And it became popular almost immediately. Three months later it was played during the Battle of New Orleans.
But, strangely, it wasn't until March, 1931, that Congress officially approved of the song as the country's national anthem. The Army and the Navy, however, had recognized "The Star Spangled Banner" as the national anthem long before Congress adopted it.
Do you know the opening words to "The Star Spangled Banner? They go like this:
" Oh say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there.
Oh! say, does the star spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?''