America The Beautiful

Words by Kathrine Lee Bates 

Music by Samuel Ward

Arr. by Frank La Rocca

For most of the audience, the most familiar song in tonight’s concert will be “America the Beautiful” which has become an unofficial second national anthem.  It has been performed before the Star-Spangled Banner in every Super Bowl since 2009.  (Since 2021 they have also performed “Lift Every Voice and Sing”, the black national anthem  which you will also get to hear in this concert.)

In fact before the “Star-Spangled Banner” was officially declared our national anthem in 1931, “America the Beautiful” was in close competition with the former song.  The former song had several deficiencies:  its warlike lyrics did not fit the pacifist tenor of the years following World War I; it was about a war nobody really wanted to remember, and it was anti-British which also was not a popular sentiment after the war.  Whereas “America the Beautiful” was, according to one novelist, “…America; not a petty naval action in a half-forgotten petty war, fitted to a semi-unsingable air of a ponderous old English booze song.”

Nevertheless, the “Star-Spangle Banner” won out, probably because it had been around a lot longer and had been a de facto national anthem since at least 1889 when the U.S. Navy had adopted it.  And during World War I, President Woodrow Wilson had ordered it played at military and other appropriate occasions.  Since then, there have been several attempts in congress to replace the official anthem with “America the Beautiful”.

There are some other interesting parallels between the two songs.  First, both were poems that were later set in a pre-existing tune.  Francis Scott Key wrote his poem during the siege of Baltimore in August 1814.  Very soon thereafter his brother-in-law set the words to “To Anacreon in Heaven”, the aforementioned “old English Booze song”.  By contrast Katherine Lee Bates poem, which she wrote in 1893 used a very common metre, and  by 1900 had been set to 75 different melodies.  By 1910, a tune Samuel A. Ward wrote in 1882 for a hymn called “O Mother, Dear Jerusalem” rose to the top as the tune most befitting the poem.  (Ward sadly died in 1903 and never lived to see the success of his work.)

A second parallel is that we seldom hear more than the first verse of each and when we do hear subsequent verses, there are phrases that can make you think, “Wait!  What?”. 

I can never forget the first time I heard the words “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just…” in the “Star-Spangled Banner”  First, this is rather cheeky given that the War of 1812 started with an attempt by us to invade Canada that ended badly and Key penned these words just weeks after the British had set our nation’s capital afire and ransacked the White House and Capitol Building.  Second, this phrase is a motto that our leaders have followed all too often in recent wars with disastrous consequences for both us and the conquered.  (Or should I say “liberated”.)

Similarly, there are a couple of unexpected phrases you will hear in the second and third verses of “America the Beautiful”: “…till selfish gain no longer stain the banner of the free” and “God mend thine every flaw”.   “Wait,” you may wonder, “wasn’t this song supposed to be about how great we are?”.  But that’s the difference between “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful”.  The former assumes we are always right, the latter evokes a striving for an ideal we have not reached.