Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Ruining the National Anthem

Turns out, there is an answer to that question and we have just the experts here on staff who can help us out. I interviewed Kenneth Slowik, the Director of the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society.

"It has a lot to do with the range," he said. "It's a very wide range. Basically, the notes are very high." Okay, fair enough, but how high are we talking?

"High f—it's traditionally sung in Bb major because going higher than that makes it hard for the altos and basses singing to get to the high note, and going lower makes it hard for the tenors and sopranos to manage," he said.

Educator Dan Holm, a tenor who frequently sings the Star-Spangled Banner for, and much better than, me during the Flag Folding Ceremony, agrees, "I'm always practicing the first part of the song to make sure I'm low enough, but still starting in a comfortable place so I can hit both the high and very lowest note. If I don't, I just switch the octave I'm singing in."

Folk musician Pete Seeger might agree. In this video from Smithsonian Folkways, he invites the audience to join in and assures him he's using a "a very, very low key, so everybody can sing it," which they do.

Even trained choirs and singers have trouble with the song, and some flat out refuse to sing it because it is too difficult. So if people whose livelihood is singing can't do it, what are the untrained to do?

Kenneth offers sage words of wisdom: "Probably, it's best to be sung the way it was originally intended, that is to be sung as the Anacreontic Song, that is to say, a traditional British Gentleman's Club song—where you can really belt out the top."

Another important tip: get the lyrics right. If you think "O'er the ramparts" is a tough line, just be glad we typically don't sing beyond the first stanza, which contains challenging phrases such as "foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes" and "fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?"

Part of the difficulty with “The Star Spangled Banner” is its wide-ranging melody that skips around a lot, Henderson said. “Most popular songs today are not written with that wide of a range.”

There’s also the bit at the end, the last stanza where singers have to hit a particularly high note on “free” in the last line: “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

“In most people’s voice, in the traditional key it’s sung, that’s a difficult place even for professional singers to make sound good,” Henderson said.

Add to that the fact that most people often forget the lyrics—originally a poem written by Francis Scott Key in 1814 after the Battle of Baltimore during the War of 1812—and the song becomes a land mine of potential blunders.

NATS member Robert Edwin believes that a lot of people forget the lyrics because very few understand what is actually going on in the song.

“Only a very small number of people have come into my studio with any idea of the ‘who, what, where, when, why, and how’ of the song,” Edwin wrote in the association’s Journal of Singing. “In order to diminish the chances of public failure and subsequent embarrassment for your students when they perform our national anthem, a short history lesson should precede any singing.”