original draft of the star spangled banner song lyrics

The NFL was barely 25 years old, and both baseball and boxing were more popular. World War II was coming to a close and the commissioner presented President Harry Truman with a golden pass to any game on any day. He finally penned 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at the Indian Queen Tavern, deep in the Maryland countryside.When NFL Commissioner Elmer Layden visited the White House in August 1945, no sitting president had ever attended a professional football game. Key was eventually set free after about two days with the British fleet. 'It's not one of these bawdy, everybody jumping on tables and stuff like that to sing.' 'Now, this is a polite drinking song,' Kummerow says. Where the song now says, 'Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light,' it originally had, 'through the dawn's early light.' The second edit is in the third stanza - today, usually only the first stanza is sung.Īmerica's national anthem may have sounded familiar to some across the pond: It began as a British drinking song. 'The first one was in the very first line.' 'There are two corrections in it,' says Burt Kummerow, president and CEO of the Historical Society. The first draft has his edits in heavy, black ink. Trying to work out a prisoner release, he watched the bombardment of Fort McHenry - the rocket's red glare, bombs bursting in air. He wrote the lyrics while being held aboard a British ship.

The original quill-and-ink manuscript was written by Francis Scott Key. Americans may not know much about that war, but they do know a song the war inspired: 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' The first scratches of those phrases are on display at the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore. Monday is the 200th anniversary of the start of the War of 1812.

Original draft of the star spangled banner song lyrics