Time for a new national anthem?

Controversy has surrounded our national anthem a long time. Like the weather, said Mark Twain, everybody complains about it but nobody does anything about it. A national anthem should express dignity, pride and a sense of national purpose. Above all, it should be easy to sing. "The Star-Spangled Banner" is none of these. It's a dinosaur - archaically phrased, difficult to sing and a reminder of the only war in which an enemy successfully invaded our nation and burned the capitol. Worse, the tune itself isn't even American - it's English. But what, after all, exemplifies a good national anthem? "God Save the Queen" has less to do with England than celebrating monarchy; "La Marseillaise" is splendid but really is about revolution against monarchy. "O Canada"? As boring as gravy on French fries.

So how did we end up with "The Star-Spangled Banner"?

First published in 1814 as Frances Scott Key's poem "The Defence of Fort McHenry," the words are confident, defiant and imperial: "Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just," trumpets the final verse.

The tune is "To Anacreon In Heav'n," theme of an 18th century London gentlemen's club. It actually makes a very good drinking song, with its dramatic caesura followed by the tipsy high tenor note on the last phrase.

The middle part, which strains the vocal range of ordinary mortals, was intended to be amusing. Where we sing "And the rockets' red glare," the original song had the Athenian poet Anacreon calling down from heaven in an effete falsetto, "Voice, fiddle, and flute, no longer be mute, I'll lend ye my name, and inspire ye, t'boot!"

While it was made the official national anthem in 1931 by an act of Congress, "The Star-Spangled Banner" doesn't really express who we are. But if it doesn't, what does?

The first patriotic song to achieve general acceptance was "Hail! Columbia," written in 1798 by Joseph Hopkinson to a march by Philip Phile, both Philadelphians. It - not "The Star-Spangled Banner" - was our national song for the next 60 years:

Hail Columbia! Happy Land!

Hail, ye heroes! heav'n-born band!

Who fought and bled in Freedom's cause

And when the storm of war was gone,

Enjoyed the Peace your valor won.

It concludes, "As a Band of Brothers join'd, Peace and Safety we shall find." Its vision of the newly independent states as a "band of brothers," rather than a single "nation," would not be settled until the Civil War. With its vision of peace and safety, "Hail! Columbia" was too benign to survive the fratricidal ferocity of that war. "The Star-Spangled Banner" marched in to take its place.

Other patriotic songs caught America's fancy over the decades. In the 1820s, a Boston organist named Lowell Mason went into the publishing business, having discovered that music published in Europe did not enjoy copyright protection in the United States. Among his early borrowings was a chorale from Saxony.

Gott segne Sachsenland,

Wo fest die Treue stand

In Sturm und Nacht!

Became

My country, 'tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing.

Ironically, the tune was already in use - as "God Save the Queen." Nevertheless, America's plodding lyric would hang on for a century, droned by schoolchildren, perhaps because it was one hell of a lot easier to sing than the alternative.

In 1918, Irving Berlin was in an Army camp producing a fundraising upbeat musical comedy about ... an army camp. "God Bless America" was dropped from the show as too pretentious and solemn. Two decades later, he revived the song, which was premiered on Kate Smith's radio program for Armistice Day. With World War II looming, Berlin, his uncanny finger on the pulse of the nation, chose a song of national unity.

God bless America

Land that I love

Stand beside her

And guide her

Through the night

With the light

From above ...

If we were looking for something to fit Tea Party sentiments, "God Bless America" would be it, with its invocation of God's uncritical blessing, its list of national resources to be exploited and its unthinking patriotism.

Shortly after the Hit Parade enshrined "God Bless America," a hobo-songwriter-labor organizer named Woody Guthrie countered it:

This land is your land,

This land is my land,

From California

To the New York Island,

From the redwood forests

To the Gulf-stream waters,

This land was made for you and me.

The '50s and '60s marked a demographic shift - younger audiences, while not immune to platitudes (see "Stand By Me"), no longer responded to the kind of patriotic sentiments that stirred their parents. The prevailing mood, even through the '70s and '80s, was mistrust to the point of cynicism. Bruce Springsteen's take, "Born in the U.S.A.," reflects a culture in which rock-bottom is the only country we know.

For a historian of popular music, looking over the last 200 years, there's only one song that expresses the qualities needed for a true national anthem. Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel Ward's 1893 hymn "America the Beautiful" has the nobility of "God Bless America," while the lyrics - rather than invoking God's blessing a priori - ask God to make us worthy of his blessing:

America! America!

God shed his grace on thee,

And crown thy good with brotherhood,

From sea to shining sea.

Almost everyone knows it. And isn't it closer to what we want to be? From the Atlantic to the Pacific, a nation founded upon principles, in which "brotherhood" takes on new meanings and expects us to live up to them: an anthem that does not celebrate military victories of the past but asks divine guidance for the moral and social struggles yet to come.

Joseph Byrd, a composer and a scholar of popular music, is adjunct professor of music at College of the Redwoods in Eureka. Send your feedback to us through our online form at SFGate.com/chronicle/submissions/#1.

This article appeared on page E - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle