President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, and was made the national anthem by a congressional resolution on March 3, 1931. ” The Star-Spangled Banner” was recognized for official use by the United States Navy in 1889, and by U.S. The lyrics come from “Defence of Fort McHenry“, a poem written in 1814 by the lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key after witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry by British ships of the Royal Navy in Baltimore Harbor during the Battle of Baltimore in the War of 1812. Fittingly, one of Fitzgerald’s working titles for his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, was ‘Under the Red, White and Blue’.The “Star-Spangled Banner” is the national anthem of the United States of America. Scott Fitzgerald – who was Key’s second cousin, three times removed. By then, his name was attached to another famous American writer, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald – better known as F. If things had been a little different, ‘ Hail, Columbia’, ‘ America the Beautiful’, or even ‘ My Country, ’Tis of Thee’ were all contenders for that honour.įrancis Scott Key was, of course, long dead by the time his poem became the lyrical basis for his country’s national anthem. So, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ started life as a poem called ‘The Defence of Fort M’Henry’, was written not by one of America’s leading poets of the day but by an amateur, and – despite being written in 1814 – only became the official US national anthem in 1931. These words, of course, have become famous beyond the poem (or song): many people refer to the United States as the ‘land of the free’, especially. Throughout ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, Francis Scott Key uses the refrain, ‘O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave’.
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