Lend an ear…check out the audio link
Decades ago, Jim Andrew played the role of Professor Harold Hill in “The Music Man.” Thursday he was again a Music Man. As emcee for the celebration of Greene County and Jefferson as the first Home Base Iowa community, he led the 150 or so people gathered in the AAI showroom in the first verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” our national anthem.
It’s a difficult song to sing, but Jim picked a starting pitch that fit the vocal range of most folks. The result was a vocal rendition that felt incredibly “right” at the kickoff not of a football game, but of a program than can benefit veterans and Greene County, too. Click on the green button to listen.
The melody we sing for our national anthem was a well-known bawdy British song before Francis Scott Key’s poem “Defence of Fort M’Henry” was set to it. It was renamed “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
It was recognized for official use by the U.S. Navy in 1889, and by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916. It was Iowa’s own President Herbert Hoover who signed the congressional resolution making “The Star-Spangled Banner” our national anthem in 1931.
