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The reason 'The Star-Spangled Banner' is so hard to sing

The Blaze
18 hours 20 minutes ago


Most Americans know the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Few know the tune wasn’t written for America at all.

The melody Francis Scott Key used was the popular English tune "To Anacreon in Heaven," originally the constitutional song of the Anacreontic Society, a gentlemen’s music club in London.

The next time you bail on the high note at a ball game or a July 4 cookout, don’t blame your lungs.

The club met regularly for a formal concert, dinner, and social time during which members entertained each other with songs. Its 1780 membership included peers, commoners, aldermen, gentlemen, actors, and tradesmen.

Although it is often described as a “drinking song,” the song was not a barroom ballad — it was convivial, but in a special and stately way. The verses were sung by a solo singer, with the entire society joining in only on the refrain.

When Key wrote his lyrics on September 14, 1814, after watching the British attack Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, he wasn’t composing original music — he was setting new words to a tune Americans would have instantly recognized.

RELATED: Whitlock blasts Victor Wembanyama for flagrantly disrespecting national anthem in NBA finals

Nik Pennington/MLB Photos/Getty Images

He wasn’t the first American to do it. By 1798, many new songs had already been set to the melody, including “Adams and Liberty,” a patriotic song in praise of the nation’s second president. By 1820, 84 sets of lyrics had been written to it in the United States alone.

The tune’s origins also explain a common modern complaint: The anthem is famously difficult to sing. It was intended for solo performance by an experienced vocalist — never designed for mass singing.

The composer’s identity was itself a mystery for generations. John Stafford Smith was identified as the writer of the original tune only in the 1970s, when a librarian in the music division of the Library of Congress tracked him down.

So the next time you bail on the high note at a ball game or a July 4 cookout, don’t blame your lungs. Blame an 18th-century London music club that never expected anyone outside its dining room to try.

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Zoe Jung

The broken chain at Lady Liberty’s feet: What it really means to be a patriot

The Blaze
19 hours 50 minutes ago


When most think of the Statue of Liberty, they picture her halo-like crown — the seven rays symbolizing a beacon of hope to the rest of the world. Or they think of the torch held aloft in her right hand, a representation of enlightenment and liberty lighting the way to freedom and progress.

But as our nation nears its 250th birthday this Independence Day, many Americans still overlook one of her most powerful symbols: the broken chain and shackle partially hidden under the hem of her flowing robes.

This chain and shackle, says Glenn Beck, represent a crucial piece of the American identity.

In this powerful monologue, Glenn takes us beyond the usual symbols to reveal the profound story hidden at the Statue of Liberty’s feet — and what it truly means to be an American patriot.

“France didn't give [the Statue of Liberty] to us because they liked us. They were fighting Marxism in their own country, and they were trying to show America has the best idea,” Glenn recounts.

The reason for the broken chain and shackle around her foot, he explains, is to show that America “broke the chain of slavery.”

“And how did we do it?” Glenn asks. “Here's a tip: With what's in her [left] hand.”

In Lady Liberty’s left hand sits a rectangular tablet inscribed with "JULY IV MDCCLXXVI" — July 4, 1776, in Roman numerals. It represents the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and emphasizes that liberty rests on principles of law and order.

The idea of “independence” and that “all men are created equal” is what “breaks the chain of slavery,” Glenn exclaims.

“And what makes man man? The ability to invent, the ability to dream, the ability to do. That's the torch!” he continues.

Put them all together, and you get a striking picture of what America is and who she is for: the “free man … under the law” who can turn “dreams” into reality and thus “light the entire world.”

Believing in this is what true patriotism is about.

“Patriotism is not about red hats. It's not about waving flags or chanting slogans at rallies. It's not about God bless the USA. It's not about any of that stuff,” says Glenn, calling these surface-level expressions “sugar highs.”

“Real patriotism is deeper. … It's the steady, bone-deep love of the country that raised you even when it didn't get things right.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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BlazeTV Staff

Rare Declaration of  Independence copy goes on display — 250 years after the British intercepted it

The Blaze
20 hours 20 minutes ago


On the night of July 4, 1776, as delegates of the Continental Congress dispersed into the Philadelphia darkness, a printer named John Dunlap got to work.

The assignment was urgent. Congress had just approved the Declaration of Independence and needed copies immediately. Through the night, Dunlap and his assistants set type and printed roughly 200 broadsides carrying the astonishing news that Britain's American colonies had declared themselves free and independent states.

By early 1778, copies of the Declaration were being debated in Parliament itself.

These first printings were never intended to become museum pieces. They were meant to travel — by horseback, by ship, and by express rider — to army camps, city squares, and eventually, to foreign governments whose support the fledgling republic desperately needed. Some were pinned to walls and read aloud to soldiers. Others were folded, carried, and eventually discarded.

Most were lost, damaged, or simply thrown away.

In enemy hands

Just 26 of the original Dunlap broadsides are known to survive. One of them took an especially unlikely journey.

Barely five weeks after it rolled off Dunlap's press, the document fell into British hands. Captured during the Revolutionary War and sent back across the Atlantic, it arrived in London accompanied by a dispatch from Vice Admiral Richard Howe and General William Howe, the brothers leading Britain's military campaign in North America.

The Howes occupied an unusual position. They were not only commanders tasked with defeating the rebellion but also King George III's peace commissioners, charged with seeking some form of reconciliation with the colonies. Ironically, they were among the last senior British officials who still believed the breach might be repaired. Lord Howe would later suggest that, had his peace commission arrived only days earlier, independence might have been avoided.

Instead, it was the Howes themselves who sent London one of the first printed copies of the Declaration of Independence, informing ministers that the colonists had declared themselves "absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown."

A decisive break

For many on both sides of the conflict, the Declaration marked a decisive break. The quarrel with the colonies had become something altogether different: the birth of a new nation.

In that sense, this was the copy that told Britain the American crisis had entered an entirely new phase.

Now, nearly 250 years later, that same sheet of paper is on display as the centerpiece of the America 250 celebrations at the American Museum and Gardens in Bath.

The broadside's story has acquired another twist in recent years. Although it had long been held by Britain's National Archives, it was only identified in 2009 as a surviving Dunlap Broadside, making it the most recently discovered of the 26 known copies.

RELATED: America's founding is an inheritance purchased with blood; we owe it our remembrance

David Jones III. Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Philadelphia freedom

More recently still, historians traced the document's origins to Jonas Phillips, a Jewish merchant and patriot who lived just doors from John Dunlap's Philadelphia print shop. Research suggests that Phillips mailed the broadside to his cousin and business partner in Amsterdam in hopes of spreading the news of American independence abroad.

To evade British searches, he enclosed a note written in Yiddish referring only to "a declaration of that whole country." The precaution failed. The letter, the Declaration, and the accompanying papers were seized by the British and eventually filed away in government archives.

What survives, then, is not merely one of America's founding texts but also a rare piece of wartime intelligence — a document that crossed an ocean, vanished into the British state papers, and remained hidden there for more than two centuries.

The annotations on the reverse are striking for their banality. Officials in the colonial secretary's office simply logged the Declaration and its accompanying papers as part of the ordinary business of government. One of history's most consequential political texts was processed like routine correspondence.

Talk of the town

Yet the document did not simply disappear into an archive. By early 1778, copies of the Declaration were being debated in Parliament itself. Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond, a leading critic of Lord North's government, read portions of the text aloud in the House of Lords and argued that Britain might ultimately have no choice but to recognize American independence.

In that sense, the Declaration became more than an American founding document. It also became part of Britain's own argument over the war and the future of its empire.

The document also illustrates the tyranny of distance in the eighteenth century. News from North America often took six to 10 weeks to reach Britain, and any instructions sent in response required an equally long journey back across the Atlantic. By the time officials in Whitehall learned of dramatic events in the colonies, those events had already become history.

Matt Himes