Who has the best national anthem?

[Bristol-Cruiser]

Inspired by the World Cup, who has the best (most stirring?) national anthem - not including your own if you lean that way? Perhaps it is the Casablanca influence but I go for La Marseillaise. When the Soviet Union collapsed they stopped using their long-time anthem. I thought Canada should buy the rights to it. More recently, in an attempt to recreate the SU, Putin brought back the old anthem, it is a wonderful piece of music. I heard the Japanese anthem before the came today and my wife's comment, which I completely agreed with, is that it sounded like funeral music.

 

[chinabald]

I like O Canada. But that might be because it’s played so often before NHL games

 

[Mrleft8]

I like the national anthem of the..... Oh.... Shit! What's it called again?!
It's...... It sounds like...............
Hold on it's coming to me..................

 

[Virgulino Ferreira]

who has the best (most stirring?) national anthem

I don't think I disagree with you. The Anthem of the CCCP and La Marseillaise give me goosebumps. Even a selfish coward like me is inclined to shut up and march to these songs.

Love your idea of Canada buying the rights!!!

As pure joy and music, however, I humbly submit the Brazilian anthem:



The American composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (19th century) travelled through Central and South America and eventually died at a young age in Brazil. He composed the stunningly beautiful "Grand Fantasy on the Brazilian National Anthem":

 

[animeproblem]

ITALY, by a country mile.

 

[basketcase]

I like O Canada. But that might be because it’s played so often before NHL games

theres not much better that the true Canadian National Anthem, and I dont give a fuck about hockey, and you never saw someone say that before......

 

[Bristol-Cruiser]

I don't think I disagree with you. The Anthem of the CCCP and La Marseillaise give me goosebumps. Even a selfish coward like me is inclined to shut up and march to these songs.

Love your idea of Canada buying the rights!!!

As pure joy and music, however, I humbly submit the Brazilian anthem:



The American composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (19th century) travelled through Central and South America and eventually died at a young age in Brazil. He composed the stunningly beautiful "Grand Fantasy on the Brazilian National Anthem":

We have rules here! You can't nominate your own NA. My first exposure to the Soviet Union anthem was at the 1972 Summit Series between Canada and the Soviets. The anthems were sung wonderfully by a Canadian singer named Roger Doucet. I imagine he had no knowledge of Russian but gave an incredible rendition.

 

[P_Wop]

La Marseillaise. I'll always remember as a kid when sung in Rick's Café in Casablanca. So powerful and passionate.

 

[dacapo]

ITALY, by a country mile.

Frateli D'Italia.............

 

[dacapo]

its actually Il Canto degli Italiani

 

[Danceswithoctopus]

La Marseillaise. I'll always remember as a kid when sung in Rick's Café in Casablanca. So powerful and passionate.

 

[SloopJonB]

The French.

Probably not a good time to mention it but the Russian one is pretty good too.



The American one would be up there if there were more than a couple of dozen people capable of singing it.

 

[Danceswithoctopus]

The American one would be up there if there were more than a couple of dozen people capable of singing it.

If by American, you mean USAian, it's a drinking song with 'new' lyrics.
https://youtu.be/ydAIdVKv84g

 

[Point Break]

Well, I pick our Star Spangled Banner of course…..but I’m biased. I’ve stood so many times - in school, the military and the FD - and listened that I associate it with important concepts. IF I cannot choose my own……of course I choose La Marseillaise especially as shown in Casablanca. Who could fail to be moved by that presentation.

 

[boomer]

I'm biased with extreme prejudice - The Star Spangled Banner, the Constitution and Old Glory go hand and hand to me. I put no other national anthem before The Star Spangled Banner. Since I was a wee lad and had a interest in USA history, the Revolution, the War of 1812, USA history since then and what shaped the country we know today.

A story some may or may not have heard about Old Glory.

Captain William Driver was born on March 17, 1803, in Salem, Connecticut. At age 13, Driver ran away from home to become a cabin boy on a ship.

At 21, Driver qualified as a master mariner and assumed command of his own ship, the Charles Doggett. In celebration of his appointment, Driver's mother and other women sewed the flag and gave it to him as a gift in 1824.

The flag was originally designed to unfurl grandly from a ship’s mast. Driver received the homemade flag with 24 stars in 1824, sewn for him by his mother and a group of young Salem female admirers to celebrate his appointment, at the age of just 21, as a master mariner and commander of his own ship, the Charles Doggett. According to legend, when Driver raised the flag up the main mast, he lifted his hat and declaimed, “My ship, my country, and my flag, Old Glory.” He likely named the flag when reflecting on his adventurous 20-year career as an American merchant seaman who sailed to China, India, Gibraltar and throughout the South Pacific, at one point ferrying survivors of the HMS Bounty from Pitcairn Island under the flag.

“It has ever been my staunch companion and protection,” he wrote. “Savages and heathens, lowly and oppressed, hailed and welcomed it at the far end of the wide world. Then, why should it not be called Old Glory?”

A portrait of Driver as a young captain shows a dashing man with black sideburns, a confident smile and a frothy white shirt. He made profits in the tortoise-shell trade, and could converse a bit in Fijian. Family memoirs tell stories of him seizing the wheel of his ship himself in gales, and facing down a hostile tribal chief in New Zealand with a pistol in hand and a dirk in his mouth.

“The flag embodied America as he knew it at that point, going across the world,” says NMAH curator Jennifer Locke Jones. “He carried it with him and it was the pride of this independent free spirit. He was taking a bit of America to uncharted territories and he felt very proud that this was the symbol he flew under. He took a piece of his home with him wherever he went.”

In 1837, Driver gave up seafaring after his wife, Martha Silsbee Babbage died, leaving him with three young children. Driver decided to settle in Nashville, where his three brothers had opened a store. Only 34 years old, he quickly remarried the next year, choosing a Southern girl less than half his age, Sarah Jane Parks, and started a second family that grew to nine children.

Driver flew his flag on holidays “rain or shine,” according to one of his Nashville-born daughters, Mary Jane Roland. It was so large that he attached it to a rope from his attic window and stretched it on a pulley across the street to secure it to a locust tree. In 1860, according to Roland, he and his wife and daughters repaired it, sewing on the additional ten stars, and Driver himself appliquéd a small white anchor in the lower right corner to signify his career.

But as secession neared, Driver’s flag became a source of contention, and by the outbreak of the war, Driver’s own family was bitterly riven. Two of his sons were fervent Confederates and enlisted in local regiments; one of them would later die of his wounds at the Battle of Perryville. One can only imagine the tensions between the Salem-born and Nashville-born Drivers, whose relations may have already been strained by first- and second-family rivalry.

In March 1862, Driver wrote despairingly, “Two sons in the army of the South! My entire house estranged...and when I come home...no one to soothe me.”

Local Confederates attempted to seize Old Glory soon after Tennessee seceded. When Gov. Isham G. Harris sent a committee to Driver’s house to demand the flag, Driver met the men at the door. Picture a defiant 58-year-old with a chest still barrel-full and an out-thrust chin. “Gentlemen...if you are looking for stolen property in my house, produce your search-warrant,” he declared. Cowed, the committee left the premises.

Unsatisfied, local guerrillas made another attempt to seize the flag. When an armed squad arrived on Driver’s front porch, he stalked out to confront them. “If you want my flag you’ll have to take it over my dead body,” he threatened. They retreated.

Driver, by now convinced that the flag was in imminent danger, decided to hide it. With the help of the more loyal women in a neighboring household, it was sewn into a coverlet. It remained there until late February 1862, when Nashville became the first Southern capital to fall.
Union troops led by the Sixth Ohio entered the city. When Driver saw the Stars and Stripes and regimental colors of the Sixth Ohio go up the flagstaff of the capitol, he made his way there and sought out the Union commander, Gen. William “Bull” Nelson. As Nelson’s aide Horace Fisher recalled it, “A stout, middle-aged man, with hair well shot with gray, short in stature, broad in shoulder, and with a roll in his gait, came forward and asked, ‘Who is the General in command? I wish to see him.’” Driver introduced himself as a former sea captain and loyal Unionist and then produced his coverlet.

Fisher recalled: “Capt. Driver - an honest-looking, blunt-speaking man, was evidently a character; he carried on his arm a calico-covered bedquilt; and, when satisfied that Gen. Nelson was the officer in command, he pulled out his jack-knife and began to rip open the bedquilt without another word. We were puzzled to think what his conduct meant.”

Finally, Fisher added, “the bedquilt was safely delivered of a large American flag, which he handed to Gen. Nelson, saying, ‘This is the flag I hope to see hoisted on that flagstaff in place of the damned Confederate flag set there by that damned rebel governor, Isham G. Harris. I have had hard work to save it; my house has been searched for it more than once.’ He spoke triumphantly, with tears in his eyes.”

General Nelson accepted the flag and ordered it run up on the statehouse flagstaff. Mary Jane Roland, Driver's daughter, claimed to have witnessed what happened next: It was greeted with “frantic cheering and uproarious demonstrations by soldiers,” many of them from the Sixth Ohio. The regiment would adopt “Old Glory” as its motto.

The confusion over flags began later that night, when a storm threatened to tear the banner to pieces. Driver apparently replaced it with a newer, stronger one, and once again stowed Old Glory away for safekeeping. There were also reports that Driver gave a flag to the Sixth Ohio as it left the city. According to Roland, however, the main flag remained stored in the Driver home until December 1864 and the second battle for Nashville.

Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood fought his army to bits trying to retake the city. As the battle raged, Driver hung his flag out of the third-story window “in plain sight,” according to Roland. He then went to join the defense of the city, telling his household before he left, “If Old Glory is not in sight, I’ll blow the house out of sight too.” Driver spent the rest of the war as a provost marshal of Nashville and worked in hospitals. According to Roland, several years before his death, he gave her the flag as a gift, on July 10, 1873. “This is my old ship flag Old Glory,” he told her. “I love it as a mother loves her child; take it and cherish it as I have always cherished it; for it has been my steadfast friend and protector in all parts of the world-savage, heathen and civilized.”

William Driver died on March 3, 1886, and was buried in Nashville City Cemetery, where, at Driver's request, his rescue of the Bounty descendants is noted on his grave stone.

Despite the calamity brought upon our nation. The American Flag - Old Glory - still flies over this nation.

 

[Howard Juno]

Not us. Ours is a fucking limp wristed dirge

 

[Grande Mastere Dreade]

 

[Grande Mastere Dreade]

my personal fav

 

[Mrleft8]

This kept me from sleep.
I would like to see a new National anthem every 10 years or so. Something contemporary, but perhaps steeped in roots, but celebrating the present, and looking towards the future.
All this 18th and 17th century music has nothing to do with today, or it's people.

 

[boomer]

Ever hear Senator John Kerry before he was US Secretary of State, play a Jimi Hendrix style version of The Star Spangle Banner on the electric guitar. Actually Jimi Hendrix had countless unrecorded versions of The Star Spangled Banner, and recorded over 70 various versions of the anthem.

Nearly everything about the 208-year-old anthem – from its meaning to how people sing it – has changed over time. Like America itself, the song is always evolving.

Many don’t realize that the “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave / O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” ends with a question mark, not an exclamation point. The song asks: Is the country still free? Is the flag still there?

It’s a question that gets renewed with every performance and constantly refreshes and changes depending on what’s going on. The song really highlights the notion of freedom and whether we have the courage as a country to try to live up to this ideal. Democracy is hard, to retain Democracy we must be vigilant. The Ukrainians, have shown the world in recent times, how hard it is to fight for Democracy. The Pendulum has been shifting since before the 2016 elections, as true patriotic Americans on both sides of the isle, have shown a willingness and strong tone in the fight for and preservation of Democracy.

In a way, the anthem started as a protest song because it created a vision of a united future that didn’t exist in 1814. For me, calling the country to account and calling Americans to live up to our ideals is really a function of the song, and it doesn’t disrespect it to call attention to where the country falls short, such as protestors who take a knee, during sporting events.

It’s entirely the [vocal] range required: The distance between the lowest and highest notes is unusually wide.

The melody comes from a song sung at a musician’s club in England and was intended to be a rousing, challenging tune that really highlighted the skills of club members.

The song does require a heroic commitment. Part of why “The Star Spangled Banner” became the national anthem is because it’s rousing, it’s motivating, and it’s energizing in a way that, say, “America the Beautiful” is not.

The combined message of patriotism and protest is fascinating. Jimi Hendrix played the anthem 70 or more times and every single performance is different. He would stick in other melodic references to show what was going on in the country in any given moment.