Marine Hymn: A Song History

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The melody of the "Marines' Hymn" is traced to Jacques Offenbach's comic opera Geneviève de Brabant.[1] Offenbach first staged the work in Paris in two acts in 1859 and enlarged it to three acts in 1867, and that revision added the number the hymn borrows, a comic duet for two gendarmes.[1][2] Neither the date nor the author of the first Marine words to the tune has been established, and Henry C. Davis, an officer to whom one or two early verses are attributed, is regarded as only one of several contributors whose share remains uncertain.[1][3] A popular tradition has an anonymous Marine writing the lyrics in Mexico in 1847, but the Marine Band calls this unlikely, since the music was written later, and a Marine Corps history journal calls the belief unsubstantiated.[2][4]

Portrait of General Winfield Scott in a dark uniform with gold epaulettes

Robert Walter Weir, General Winfield Scott, oil on canvas, ca. 1855. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Scott commanded the 1847 campaign to Mexico City that the hymn recalls; the portrait itself has no connection to the hymn.

The famous opening pairs two campaigns that were honored on the Corps' colors: the Barbary War, which ended in 1805, and the 1847 capture of Mexico City and Chapultepec Castle, the "Halls of Montezuma."[2] The Library of Congress connects the Tripoli reference to that war, in which Marines, sailors and others crossed some 600 miles of Libyan desert to take Derna.[3] An early printing of the first verse appeared in a newspaper article of November 1908, and a 1914 recruiting pamphlet carried a longer text that is largely recognizable today.[1] An official version was approved in June 1919, and its copyright was registered that August in the name of the Marine Corps at Quantico, Virginia.[1] The Leatherneck, the Corps magazine, published and distributed that first version.[3]

That copyright ran out at the end of 1947 and was not renewed.[4] Earlier, on 21 November 1942, Commandant Thomas Holcomb had approved a revision to the fourth line of the first verse.[2][4] The new wording added a mention of the air, recognizing Marine aviation, and Holcomb adopted the version proposed by a veterans' association of Marine aviators.[4]

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Sources

  1. Marine Corps University Press, Marine Corps History: "A Song with Dash and Pep".
  2. United States Marine Band: "The Marines' Hymn".
  3. Library of Congress, Patriotic Melodies: "Marines' Hymn".
  4. Marine Corps University Press, Marine Corps History: "The Devil-May-Care Song of the Leathernecks: A History of the Marines' Hymn, 1920–47".