The Star-Spangled Banner

The lyrics were written in 1814 by a 35-year-old poet-lawyer Francis Scott Key after witnessing the bombardment of Baltimore's Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. Key had boarded the British warship HMS Minden to secure the release of a friend, who had been accused of harboring British deserters. The British commanders agreed to release both men, but for security reasons, they were held overnight while the British fleet attacked the fort.

The next day, Key wrote a poem, "The Defense of Fort McHenry." The poem was later set to the tune of a popular English drinking song ("To Anacreon in Heaven"), dating from around 1800, written by John Stafford Smith. The same tune was at one time the national anthem of Luxembourg.

It was adopted as the national anthem of the United States on March 3, 1931.

"America the Beautiful," "My Country, Tis of Thee," and "God Bless America" are other popular American patriotic songs.

The most famous instrumental interpretation is Jimi Hendrix's guitar solo at the first Woodstock Festival. Although it was condemned by some conservatives as a desecration to the song, it has since become a celebrated emblematic signature of the ideals of the late 1960s.

Table of contents

1 Main Lyrics 2 Extra verses 3 See also

Main Lyrics

O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?

Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,

O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming!

And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,

Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there:

O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Extra verses

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,

Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,

What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,

As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?

Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,

In full glory reflected now shines on the stream:

'Tis the star-spangled banner! O long may it wave

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

• Stars and Stripes
• Flag of the United States
• National anthem
• The lyrics of the anthem
• Isaac Asimov on the four stanzas of the anthem