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START FREE TRIAL NOWA Second National Anthem?
Nine Americans give their suggestions for an alternative national anthem. What is yours?
[.article__paragraph--leading]America’s national anthem – “The Star-Spangled Banner” – is beautiful. But what if Americans could choose a second national anthem – one that would complement the first, and maybe even expand its poetic reach? Maybe the second anthem would be easier to sing? Maybe this other anthem would point to aspects of American history or identity that have been neglected or excluded – such as the Black American, Native American, or Hispanic experiences – or which developed after the “Star-Spangled Banner” was written during the War of 1812? What would you recommend for our second anthem?[.article__paragraph--leading]
There already is a second American national anthem: “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the “Black” national anthem. Written by a twenty-eight-year-old James Weldon Johnson and first performed in 1900 when he was a high school teacher in Florida, not yet a famed African American intellectual, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” has been embraced by Black civic organizations for more than a century. In the wake of the racial protests that shook the United States in 2020, when white Americans were looking for symbols to express their concern for racial justice, the song moved into the mainstream, often paired with the “Star Spangled Banner.” Before a women’s basketball game at Villanova University, where at least nine out of ten fans in the bleachers were white, I was startled when “The Star-Spangled Banner” was immediately followed by “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
On the one hand, it is jarring to see the transformation of words and music that I so closely associated with distinctively African American spaces, with the rhythms, tones, and values of African American life, into an anthem for the nation as a whole. (Or is it an appendix or corrective to the anthem of the nation as a whole?) Something is surely lost, but in the strangeness of the two anthems bound together in public, there is the promise that listeners will be productively unsettled.
That promise is deepened because, in many ways, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is a much richer national anthem than “The Star Spangled Banner.” While both extol perseverance in the face of adversity, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” frames that struggle with joyful, exorbitant praise, which then fuels faith and hope. The anthem ends with an affirmation of God’s Providence, and it concludes with a call to be true to our nation – subordinate to a call to be true to our God.
Growing up in southwestern Virginia, I always had a bone to pick with “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” The song just doesn’t seem to describe West Virginia. Shenandoah River? That’s a Virginia landmark, as are the Blue Ridge Mountains. A sophist could counter that a sliver of the Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge do indeed pass through the West Virginia panhandle for a few miles.
But the real answer is that the songwriters conjured an imagined land – a melding of postcards, friends’ stories, and the myth of Appalachia. That makes it malleable enough for anyone to identify the images with their own wistful retreat into the past.
It’s why “Country Roads” is America’s unofficial national anthem around the world. There’s a Japanese cover in a Miyazaki film; a zen Finnish and a Jamaican reggae cover. It’s been covered more than 150 times, in nineteen languages, and is a regular crowd pleaser at German and English football games. It awoke the passions of a World Cup crowd, where the Argentinian coach of the United States team could also be spotted bellowing the lyrics.
“The Star-Spangled Banner,” by contrast, is anchored to one specific moment in time. Furthermore, it lacks the implication that the singer’s point of view is behind the wheel of a pickup truck. “Country Roads” puts us all on a spiritual road trip, borne back into the past, yet propelled into the future by the power of – one must imagine – a 4x4, Built Ford Tough.
America deserves an anthem like herself – wistful, vast, old and young, mysterious and familiar, evocative, embracing, always going and never arriving. Frederick Jackson Turner claimed in 1893 that “what the Mediterranean was to the Greeks … the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States,” but by the 1890s, the frontier was gone.
I’d suggest to him a new paradigm: country roads.
My alternate anthem strikes a very different tone than “The Star-Spangled Banner.” ‘“Till We Reach That Day,” the closing number of Ragtime’s first act, is an anthem that mingles mourning and yearning. The soloist opens with, “There’s a day of hope,” but she is singing at a funeral. Sarah, a young Black mother, is being carried to her grave after being beaten to death.
Ragtime, a musical adapted from E. L. Doctorow’s novel of the same name, is set over the years 1906–1916. It tells the polyphonous story of a white family in New Rochelle, Black men and women in Harlem, and new immigrants trying to find their footing. Only in America could people of all these races and classes cross paths, but their attempts to ascend (morally and financially) stutter and switchback.
At Sarah’s funeral, “Till We Reach That Day” has two overlapping sentiments, repeated like drumbeats: “it will happen again and again and again” and “We’ll never get to heaven, till we reach that day.” It’s the brilliance of Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens’s music and lyrics that you can hear them both simultaneously, grief and hope together, each almost too much to bear, neither canceling out the other. America can be a promise that is frequently broken.
Adding this song to our national repertoire would serve the same role that the psalms of lament do in the Bible. These psalms offer an invitation to prayer, and thus to hope, even in the bleakest moments. “Till We Reach That Day” does not reject America as rotten at the root, but it dwells in the wounds. It’s an anthem for America’s Puddleglums, who are fiercely loyal to a country they’re not sure they’ve ever inhabited.
This question bemuses me, coming at it as a practicing church musician. People sing when they’re comfortable, and they’re comfortable with what’s familiar. Our existing anthem is a sturdy English tavern tune, recycled, and paired with lyrics that are out of its league. The melody isn’t actually singer-friendly – large leaps, daunting range – but we can all hear it in our mind’s ear. Those who are impelled to sing it will do so with gusto.
Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” has this same melodic je ne sais quoi. It’s as singable as any other song in the USA, 2026. This is not meant as an endorsement of its compositional merits but as a lament on music literacy. We’ve bottomed out. Everyone loves music but we, in this country, largely experience music as passive consumers rather than active makers. Go to karaoke night: it’s rough. That’s matching pitch with a back track. Imagine singing a cappella! When – if – people sing, the performance defies the conventional, technical explanations. When they don’t, the same holds true.
The lyrics pose certain problems. Not everyone is like the male narrator, a man with a wife and kids. Some people have sincere conscientious objections to military service. Some don’t believe in God. But, for that matter, a higher number of people than any time since the Civil War are quailing at the very fact in question: the great American experiment. We mustn’t forget that the first stanza of Key’s anthem ends with a sobering question mark! Our civics education data do corroborate a certain ambivalence or outright ignorance of foundational concepts. We could slash and burn Greenwood’s lyrics with the editor’s pen, but why build the Ship of Theseus? An anthem isn’t a love letter to the civically agnostic.
In their best moments, Greenwood’s lyrics complement Key’s anthem. For starters, the song reaches beyond the Alleghenies in the second verse – well west of Fort McHenry – to places where land was surveyed in square sections, arpents, and varas cuadradas. That’s a good, inclusive start. If anything, there’s a certain political savvy. The sweeping virtual flyover takes us “from DE-troit down to Houston, from New York to LA.” What a line! These are places, in real life, that are very different from each other. Sometimes they even love to hate on each other. In any real political contest, the Northeast or swing-state Michigan do not often align with the Lone Star State. But let’s be honest: Jack Kennedy didn’t pick LBJ to be his running mate because they were besties. I wager that if you put this song to a vote you could build a winning coalition. This song had a moment after 9/11, when the country came together, and it still lives.That’s what an anthem should do: convoke a people, if not by singing, then with vibes.
“The Star-Spangled Banner” is a hard song, and I mean that as praise. It sits high in the register, has difficult lyrics, and asks something of the people made to sing it. I’m comfortable with a democratic society that asks something hard of its citizens, so long as that society gives us the tools to succeed (which sadly ours often does not).
But my favorite of the earlier de facto anthems is “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” Samuel Francis Smith set his words to the melody of “God Save the King” and there is something appealing about a young republic singing its own liberty to the tune of the monarch it had just thrown off. The Enlightenment side of the Revolution, the revolt against inherited power, is in its borrowed notes.
Of course, as a leftist, the clearest choice for me is “This Land Is Your Land.” Woody Guthrie wrote it as a socialist’s answer to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” and the verses cut from the schoolroom version are the ones that hit the hardest: the “private property” sign and the people lined up outside the relief office. It captures both the promise of America and the concentrated wealth standing between us and fulfilling that promise.
Either would suit me. One is the republican revolt against kings, while the other is the democratic-socialist revolt against the tyrannies our own century keeps producing.
America’s second national anthem should be “America the Beautiful.” The text was written by Katharine Lee Bates, an English professor at Wellesley College who was traveling cross-country in 1893. Looking out on the Great Planes from Pikes Peak, the words began to come to her, and she wrote them down when she returned to her hotel. The poem was published two years later as “America” in The Congregationalist. Some years before, Samuel Ward, the organist and choir director at an Episcopal Church in Newark, had a hymn tune come to him on the ferry ride from Coney Island to New York City. He wrote it down and named it “Materna.” In 1910, text and tune were united and given the name “America the Beautiful.”
“America the Beautiful” is America’s greatest patriotic song for four reasons. First, its focus is on gratitude to God and country, which are the heart of rightly ordered patriotism. Second, it celebrates America’s natural beauty as one of God’s greatest gifts to us. It’s easy for us to take this beauty for granted but – as the astonishment of many visiting World Cup spectators reminded us – our country’s size and splendor are remarkable: amber waves of grain, fruited plains, and purple mountain majesties, to name only three of its features.
Third, the song celebrates the best moral aspirations that have shaped America’s character and history. And it challenges us to live up to them despite our past failures to do so. It pleads with God to mend our flaws, to confirm our liberty in right-ordered laws, to refine our gold so that our successes would be noble, even divine. It asks him for things we desperately need: self-control and brotherhood. Lastly, it reminds us of the heavenly city to which we owe our ultimate allegiance, for which America at its best can only be a foretaste.
Finally, “Materna” is a stirring hymn tune that matches these noble sentiments, easy to sing, with a great pedal line at the end when played on the organ. It sounds good when sung by church congregations; it sounds like a national altar call when sung by Ray Charles.
In my view, “The Star-Spangled Banner” makes a wonderful national anthem for us. It is brisk, stirring, and vibrant. It relates to the valor of our early years. It sums up a spirit.
In the past, there was something of a movement to replace “The Star-Spangled Banner” with “America the Beautiful” as our anthem. There were two arguments: “easier to sing” and “less militaristic.”
As to the first, there ought to be a certain straining of voice in an anthem – a “singing out,” and up. As to the second, Francis Scott Key’s poem is military, in part, but not militaristic.
“America the Beautiful” is lovely in music and words. But the first verse – the one we sing – emphasizes the physical loveliness of our land (“purple mountain majesties,” etc.). Tyrannies such as North Korea are physically lovely too.
“My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” makes a good candidate. “Sweet land of liberty” is an excellent phrase, and the swiping of Britain’s “God Save the King,” for a tune, shows some American cheek.
Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” makes a candidate too. How about George M. Cohan’s “You’re a Grand Old Flag”? A rousing number, no doubt, but maybe not national-anthem material.
The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” is a great song, and a great American song. Is it too religious for a national anthem, and maybe too Union, for our South? (When Jimmy Carter was running for president in 1976, local bands would sometimes play “Marching Through Georgia.” The governor observed, “Don’t they know that’s a Yankee song?”)
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” is another great song, and great American song. It is known as the “black national anthem.” Too specific to the black experience to serve as our overall anthem? Probably.
I treasure the whole American treasury. For a national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner” wins.
Living a half-decade of my childhood in the Maryland hometown and burial place of Francis Scott Key, I’ve come to see “The Star-Spangled Banner” as less of a national anthem and more of a way of life. Our local mall, minor league baseball team, and public schools bore Key’s name. His poem gave our community a sense of pride, identity, and an unshakable belief that somehow, no matter how many times America gets knocked down, we will always climb back to our feet.
If any modern song could build on that spirit – and serve as our second national anthem – it would be Phil Ochs’s “Power and Glory.”
While Key’s anthem relives the darkest moment of the War of 1812, Ochs turns to the nation’s future, paying a tribute to the ailing Woody Guthrie by inviting the listener to “take a walk with me through a green and growing land.” This is no “America the Beautiful.” Ochs warns that American Exceptionalism comes with conditions:
Oh, her power shall rest on the strength of her freedom
Glory shall rest on us all.
And when Ochs says “all,” he means it. “Yet she’s only as rich as the poorest of the poor,” he writes, “Only as free as a padlocked prison door/ Only as strong as our love for this land/ Only as tall as we stand.” In his eyes, America is no stronger than our meekest link.
Times have changed since Old Glory flew over Fort McHenry. America is no longer the underdog, or, at least, our government isn’t, not with its endless wars, billionaire ruling class, and bloated bureaucracy which too seldom feeds the hungry or protects the vulnerable. Ochs sings to these dispossessed. In our semiquincentennial crisis, his verses remind us that America belongs to all of us, if we are determined to keep it.
In Broadside #27, one year before his official album release, Ochs published the song’s lyrics with a biting verse which never made the final cut:
But our land is still troubled by men who have to hate,
They twist away our freedoms and they twist away our fate,
Fear is their weapon and treason is their cry,
We can stop them if we try!
I write these thoughts on a morning train to Glasgow, an ocean away from Key’s grave in Mount Olivet, watching the hills of Ochs’s ancestral homeland whip past my compartment window. Even here, I am American. “Power and Glory” fills my headphones, a vow my people sing to ourselves when we’ve forgotten how to stand.
America is a country of diversity, of people from disparate cultures united in a quest for opportunity, where toil is properly rewarded. It is a country of the new, of innovation, with a dynamism emancipated from the ossification of monarchs, oligarchs, and aristocrats.
Our culture, rather than imposed from the top, comes from the bottom, rising from the Metis of the masses, spreading across the land like a brushfire, morphing and evolving as it encounters new pockets of people, oblivious to the demands of a highfalutin’ clerisy.
Popular music, specifically rock and roll, is the prime example of American culture, emerging from the blues that came from the songs of African slaves (slavery being our original sin), encountering a country sound developed by the impoverished Irish, resulting in an amped-up fusion of all these elements.
Rock and roll took over the nation because it spoke to the people, and for them, it is what they wanted to hear, it is what they wanted to say, without an aesthetic oligarchy to say “no you cannot listen to this, no you cannot dance to this, and no you cannot sing of this.”
It is a uniquely American art form, and it has taken over the world. If you talk to a young person in Indonesia, or Uganda, or Norway and ask, “What is America?,” they will tell you it is the land of rock and roll.
There are hundreds of rock songs, and as many from the equally American genre of hip-hop, that could be our anthem, but “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd is my choice. Its repetitive pounding lyric “I’m as free as a bird now” represents what everyone will tell you is the best thing about being an American: why they wish to be one, why they love to be one, or why they came – freedom.
To be free to do what you want, to sing about what you want, to proudly and stubbornly shout at the top of your lungs, at two in the morning, with buddies you just made, “I’m as free as a bird now, and this bird you cannot change.”
