America (My Country, 'Tis Of Thee): A Song History

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The words of "America" are by Samuel Francis Smith (1808–1895), a Boston-born Baptist minister who studied at Harvard and then at Andover Theological Seminary.[1][2][3] According to the Library of Congress, the composer and music educator Lowell Mason brought Smith a set of German school songbooks while he was at Andover in 1831, hoping he would either translate their texts or write fresh ones; Smith settled on one melody, probably without realizing that it was the tune of "God Save the King."[1] Smith himself recalled that the book had come to him from Mason, and the Traditional Ballad Index, citing the writer Sigmund Spaeth, identifies the melody he found there as that of the German "Heil dir im Siegerkranz."[2] Mason introduced the new hymn at a children's Independence Day service at Boston's Park Street Church on July 4, 1831, and it appeared in print in 1832.[1][3][4] Sources differ on when the words were actually written: several give 1831, while Britannica dates the song to 1832, and the Ballad Index reports that Smith later remembered writing it in that year.[1][2][4][5]

Watercolor of a Fourth of July crowd gathered in Centre Square, Philadelphia, beside a domed waterworks building and a fountain

Pavel Petrovich Svinin, Fourth of July in Centre Square, Philadelphia, watercolor, gouache, black ink and graphite, 1811–ca. 1813. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). An Independence Day crowd painted some twenty years before the hymn was first sung; it has no connection to the song.

The melody is much older, and its beginnings are uncertain. Britannica calls the origin of both words and music obscure and lists John Bull, Thomas Ravenscroft, Henry Purcell and Henry Carey among the candidates who have been proposed.[5] A claim by Carey's son that his father wrote the song in London in 1740 has been doubted by music historians, in part because the son stood to gain financially from it.[1] The tune was printed in the anthology Thesaurus Musicus in the mid-1740s, and in the American colonies it surfaced in 1761 as "Whitefield's Tune" in James Lyon's sacred collection Urania.[1][3][5] It also served as a national anthem in Denmark, Prussia and Liechtenstein as well as Britain, and Beethoven wrote a set of variations on it.[1][5]

In the United States, Britannica describes the song as a semiofficial anthem, second in popularity only to "The Star-Spangled Banner," which did not become the official anthem until President Hoover signed the law on March 3, 1931.[5][6] After the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let Marian Anderson sing in Constitution Hall because she was Black, she gave a free concert at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939; before an estimated 75,000 people, she opened the program with "America," altering one phrase of the text as she sang.[7][8]

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Sources

  1. Library of Congress: "My Country 'Tis of Thee".
  2. Traditional Ballad Index: "America (My Country 'Tis of Thee)".
  3. Park Street Church: "My Country 'Tis of Thee".
  4. U.S. Government Publishing Office, Ben's Guide: "America (My Country 'Tis of Thee): 1831".
  5. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "God Save the King".
  6. Smithsonian Institution: "Facts about the Star-Spangled Banner".
  7. National Archives: "Marian Anderson (February 27, 1897 - April 8, 1993)".
  8. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Histories of the National Mall: "Marian Anderson's Performance".