C Major / high voice (click to download)

In advance of the anthem’s anniversary, we are making a selection of the most important scores available in free downloadable editions, click here to see the editions now available.Īdams and Liberty (1798)-most popular American parody of the To Anacreon melody and a Federalist Party anthem Our Star Spangled Songbook will be available this summer with a range of historical performance scores. All of our scores are performance tested, but if you have suggestions or find an error please email with your comments. See the links below for further information about specific works. Also please recommend to friends and colleagues. If you are interested in posting videos or recordings online, please email us for easy authorization. If you use these scores, we ask that you credit the arranger-editor and the Star Spangled Music Foundation in your program and email with an announcement of your performance. Fittingly, one of Fitzgerald’s working titles for his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, was ‘Under the Red, White and Blue’.We are pleased to provide an ongoing series of Star Spangled Music Editions, with usually free, performance-ready downloadable scores of works connected to the history and legacy of American music and Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner.” 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’.

Lyrics for star spangled banner song