A star-spangled discovery
A star-spangled discovery
Tyneside researcher reveals details of how an English pub drinking song became a national anthem. Tony Henderson reports.
For over 200 years, Americans have sung their anthem The Star-Spangled Banner to the tune of an English drinking song.
Now a scholar at Newcastle University has pieced together the links in the story of how this came to be.
Dr Oskar Jenson is researching the history of song at Newcastle University’s International Centre for Music Studies.
His work has included taking part in Our Subversive Voice: The History and Politics of the English Protest Song, a two-year research project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.
A song included in the project was Millions Be Free, one of many ballads printed on a single sheet of paper and sold in the streets, public places and pubs.
It was written in the early days of the French Revolution, before Britain was at war with France, and embraced the idea of people casting off their chains and breaking free from oppressive governments.
For years, I just accepted the fact that the US national anthem began as an English drinking song as a quirk of history. So uncovering the story of Millions Be Free was just one revelation after another – a series of discoveries that suddenly made perfect, logical sense to one of the world’s most significant songs.
Dr Oskar Jenson, Newcastle University
Millions Be Free was sung to the tune of To Anacreon In Heav’n about an ancient Greek poet but William Roscoe, a slavery abolitionist, wrote new words to the tune in July 1790 when the Bastille had just fallen.
“He was the one responsible for the original Millions Be Free,” said Dr Jensen.
“My interests have always centred on a mix of song, street culture, and politics. Millions Be Free was a protest song.”
Dr Jenson’s research showed that the song was praised by feminist pioneer and author Mary Wollstonecraft, who in 1792 wrote to Roscoe and just months later travelled to Paris to take part in the revolution.
Bookseller William Pirsson emigrated to New York in the early 1790s and took the song with him, publishing it for the first time with the music notation.
It became the tune for The Star Spangled Banner. “Good melodies are fast travellers,” says Dr Jensen.
Millions Be Free continued as a tavern drinking song in England but the words “our chains” were replaced by the safer “thy chains.”
“But the original incendiary ‘our chains’, I discovered, were preserved in a collection published by John Marshall of Newcastle in 1820,” explains Dr Jenson.
This was at a time of high tension – a year after the Peterloo Massacre when 18 people died and hundreds were injured when sabre-waving cavalry charged into a crowd which had gathered peacefully at St Peter’s Field near Manchester to hear speeches about the reform of parliamentary representation.
Dr Jensen said: “For years, I just accepted the fact that the US national anthem began as an English drinking song as a quirk of history. So uncovering the story of Millions Be Free was just one revelation after another – a series of discoveries that suddenly made perfect, logical sense to one of the world’s most significant songs.
“The fact that the story involves so many key figures in the revolutionary world of the 1790s, from Thomas Paine to Mary Wollstonecraft, helps explain how the tune took on such potent associations of freedom.”
While Dr Jenson’s non-fiction work focuses upon the history of song and street culture he also writes crime, literary, historical, and children’s fiction.
His latest book, published earlier this year, is Helle and Death, which is billed as a whodunnit for the 21st Century.
It features Torben Helle – art historian, Danish expat and owner of several excellent Scandinavian jumpers – who travels to a remote snowbound Northumbrian mansion for a 10-year reunion with old university friends.