National anthem of US is described below.
Explanation:
The Star-Spangled Banner, national anthem of the United States, with music adapted from the anthem of a singing club and words by Francis Scott Key. After a century of general use, the four-stanza song was officially adopted as the national anthem by an act of Congress in 1931.
Origin
Long assumed to have originated as a drinking song, the melody was taken from the song “To Anacreon in Heaven,” which first surfaced about 1776 as a club anthem of the Anacreontic Society, an amateur mens’ music club in London. Written by British composer John Stafford Smith—whose identity was discovered only in the 1970s by a librarian in the music division of the Library of Congress—the song was sung to signal a transition between the evening’s orchestral music concert and after-dinner participatory singing.
To Anacreon in Heaven, where he sat in full glee,
A few sons of harmony sent a petition,
That he their inspirer and patron would be;
When this answer arrived from the jolly old Grecian:
Voice, fiddle, and flute, no longer be mute,
I’ll lend you my name and inspire you to boot
And besides I’ll instruct you like me to intwine
The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine.
The melody was used repeatedly throughout the 18th and 19th centuries with lyrics that changed with the affairs of the day. Lyrics set to the tune celebrated national heroes or spoke of political struggles, including temperance (1843; “Oh, Who Has Not Seen”). The first stanza, somewhat humorous, reads as follows:
Oh! who has not seen by the dawn’s early light,
Some poor bloated drunkard to his home weakly reeling,
With blear eyes and red nose most revolting to sight;
Yet still in his breast not a throb, of shame feeling!
And the plight he was in—steep’d in filth to his chin,
Gave proof through the night in the gutter he’d been,
While the pity-able wretch would stagger along,
To the shame of his friends, ’mid the jeers of the throng.
Francis Scott Key And “The Star-Spangled Banner”
Key’s song became especially popular and a powerful expression of patriotism during the Civil War, with its emotional description of the enduring national flag, which had become the symbol of the still-new nation.
The tradition of singing the national anthem at the start of major sporting events introduced numerous diverse and memorable renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner,”
