For a nation that once endorsed prohibition, it is odd that the national anthem is sung to the tune of an old drinking song from a London gentlemen’s club. Exactly how this came to be has been a mystery for more than 200 years, but it may now have been solved.

     A historian from Newcastle University has charted how the tune of The Star-Spangled Banner made its way from the Anacreontic Society to baseball games and rodeos. Oskar Cox Jensen says the tune was first purloined by a Liverpudlian abolitionist for a ballad, which was then adopted by revolutionary circles who spread it to America.  “For years I just accepted the fact that the US national anthem began as an English drinking song as a quirk of history,” Jensen said before a broadcast of his research on Radio 3’s The Essay on Wednesday night. “The fact that the story involves so many key figures in the revolutionary world of the 1790s, from Thomas Paine to Mary Wollstonecraft, is not only deeply satisfying — it helps explain how the tune took on such potent associations of freedom.”

     The theory of revolutionary fervour could help The Star-Spangled Banner appear more politically correct, as there is unease over the lyricist Francis Scott Key’s participation in the slave trade.  The tune for the US national anthem was originally the music for To Anacreon in Heaven, a bawdy song popular at the Anacreontic Society

​The tune started life as the music for To Anacreon in Heaven, a bawdy ditty subject to countless boozy renditions at the Anacreontic Society. A less likely origin for the anthem of so puritanical a country as America would be hard to find, but the tune travelled beyond the club’s meetings. In 1790 it was used by the abolitionist William Roscoe for his song Millions Be Free, a ballad espousing the hope that the French Revolution could hop over the Channel. Jensen knew that the song was praised by the women’s rights advocate Wollstonecraft, and so he traced it through revolutionary circles in London.

     The ballad was sung throughout the 1790s in taverns, and was even heard by Paine, one of the American founding fathers, before someone else exported it properly.  “William Pirsson, a Chelmsford bookseller, upped sticks to New York some time in the early 1790s, and he took Millions Be Free with him, publishing it in a new arrangement,” Jensen said. The tune had been sung in the US, but this was the first time the manuscript was seen there.  By 1798 it had been repurposed as Adams and Liberty, the first proper campaign song in US politics, for John Adams’s re-election attempt. Ultimately, this led to Key’s use of it for Defence of Fort M’henry, which became The Star-Spangled Banner.  “The American national anthem got its tune not by happenstance but by a series of revolutionary acts,” Jensen said. “For Pirsson, as for Roscoe, Millions Be Free— the refrain of which is all about tearing off chains — is as much about abolitionism as about democracy. If we give due credit to Millions Be Free, then we hear Key’s anthem anew.”  Roscoe fought for abolition throughout his life, including as an MP. Pirsson did the same, and would ultimately run the first free black school in New York, which was co-funded by Alexander Hamilton — a man who is now associated with many songs.

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