Let’s ditch “The Star-Spangled Banner” and make “Lean On Me” our national anthem instead

Over the summer, with the BLM protests raging, my fellow music educators were doing a lot of soul-searching about the more problematic items in the traditional repertoire. The conversation inevitably turned toward “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with some questions about its appropriateness as a national anthem. Francis Scott Key owned slaves, and the third verse of the song belittles the British soldiers as “hireling and slave.”

Is the SSB racist? Maybe, but that isn’t the main reason to ditch it as our anthem. For me, the big issue is that the SSB is a bad song: an awkward and unsingable melody with incomprehensible lyrics. Also, the War of 1812 is a weird hook to hang our national identity on. It’s stirring to imagine America overcoming tremendous odds against a better-armed attacker, I guess, but when was the last time you could accurately describe us this way? Probably 1812? Now it’s just tone-deaf. Another problem is that both the music and lyrics sound more like the cultural heritage of our opponents in that war, the British, because it’s a British melody using archaic British phrases.

So how about we make America’s national anthem sound more like, you know, America? Jody Rosen considers various alternatives to the SSB before arriving at the only correct answer: “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers. I learned the song as a kid from Club Nouveau’s synth-heavy version, but nothing compares to the original recording:

Now we’re talking: the song is unpretentious, communitarian, easy to sing but with room for bluesy embellishment, and gently but insistently funky. This is a song that I would sing with pride, and it represents a vision of a national community that I would want to be a part of.

I do want to take small issue with one thing Cohen says:

The lyrics are nearly all monosyllables, and in singing the verses, Withers largely shuns syncopation, letting the words fall out precisely in time with the chord changes, one syllable per chord.

While it’s true that the vocal melody mostly aligns with the chord changes, it is not true that Withers shuns syncopation. The chords anticipate the barline in three measures out of every four-measure phrase, and they also anticipate beat three (the “invisible barline”) in the last measure in each phrase. Not only that, but there are places where Withers intentionally pulls against the pattern of the chords with his voice. In my transcription below, I colored all the syncopated chords in blue, and colored the vocal syncopations that don’t align with them in red:

This tune is a fascinating music theory teaching case. The harmony is nursery-rhyme-simple functional diatonicism, but the syncopated chord placements give them a very different feeling from Mozart et al. Also, the occasional C7 chords are technically V7/IV chords, but in context they feel more like a gesture toward the blues. There’s plenty of blues in the vocal melody too: Withers slips a flat third into his melisma on “carry on” in the chorus. On the next line, “For it won’t be long,” the word “it” is a blue note, a neutral third (I notated it as a flat third because Noteflight doesn’t do microtones.) And let’s not sleep on James Gadson‘s drum part, which is subtle but propulsive.

In an interview with Songfacts, Withers tells the story of the song:

This was my second album, so I could afford to buy myself a little Wurlitzer electric piano. So I bought a little piano and I was sitting there just running my fingers up and down the piano. That’s often the first song that children learn to play because they don’t have to change fingers – you just put your fingers in one position and go up and down the keyboard. In the course of doing the music, that phrase crossed my mind, so then you go back and say, “OK, I like the way this phrase, Lean On Me, sounds with this song.” So you go back and say, “How do I arrive at this as a conclusion to a statement? What would I say that would cause me to say Lean On Me?”

Then at that point, it’s between you and your actual feelings, you and your morals and what you’re really like. You probably do more thinking about it after it’s done. Being from a rural, West Virginia setting, that kind of circumstance would be more accessible to me than it would be to a guy living in New York where people step over you if you’re passed out on the sidewalk, or Los Angeles, where you could die on the side of the freeway and it would probably be eight days before anyone noticed you were dead. Coming from a place where people were a little more attentive to each other, less afraid, that would cue me to have those considerations than somebody from a different place… It’s a rural song that translates probably across demographical lines. Who could argue with the fact that it would be nice to have somebody who really was that way? My experience was, there were people who were that way.

So to me, the biggest challenge in the world is to take anything that’s complicated and make it simple so it can be understood by the masses. Somebody said a long time ago that the world was designed by geniuses, but it’s run by idiots. When I say I’m a snob lyrically, I mean I’m a snob in the sense that I’m a stickler for saying something the simplest possible way with some elements of poetry. Because simple is memorable. If something’s too complicated, you’re not going to walk around humming it to yourself because it’s too hard to remember… So when I say I’m a snob lyrically, that means, OK, the gauntlet is down – how clear can you make it and in how few words.

Jody Cohen says, and I agree:

Not only is Black music the finest American thing, the greatest gift that the United States has given to world culture, it is one of the deepest, most truthful repositories of American history, far more honest about the failures and possibilities of the country than the triumphalist official history, which flattens the saga into a procession of Great Men, noble principles, virtuous struggles, adversity overcome, wars won, flags whipping above battlements in the sunrise.

“Lean on Me” holds another history in its bones, from the Middle Passage up to the present day. The song is tuned into the reality that life is hard, that there is pain in the past and in the present. But it holds out hope for the future, if we have the good sense to treat each other kindly. It’s right there in the first lines of the song: “Sometimes in our lives / We all have pain / We all have sorrow / But if we are wise / We know that there’s / Always tomorrow.”

So let’s make this happen! The SSB isn’t even that long-lasting a tradition. It has only been the national anthem since 1931, and we’ve only been singing it at sports events since World War II. Trey Gowdy went on Fox News to complain about the anti-SSB campaign, and said: “What started as a legitimate conversation about inequities in our justice system has now morphed into ‘Let’s just change the entire country and change the entire culture.'” That’s exactly correct. I say we begin by elevating Bill Withers to his proper place as the voice of America’s national identity in the present day, and into the future.

11 thoughts on “Let’s ditch “The Star-Spangled Banner” and make “Lean On Me” our national anthem instead

  1. Actually, the hirelings and slaves were not the British soldiers, or at least not the white ones, but referred to the slaves who fled their plantations to join the Brits in exchange for their freedom. Many of them were resettled in Trinidad, which is where I’m from, although others went to Canada and yet others stayed on to fight slavery in Florida. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merikins

  2. I love “Lean on Me” and look forward to digging into your musical analysis!

    Re. upgrading the national anthem, reminds me of this 1997 Hendrik Hertzberg New Yorker piece arguing for “Lift Every Voice and Sing” to be the one. The proposal stuck with me over the years. https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1997-07-21/flipbook/004/

    It’s such a great song, and while I’m not sold on all the lyrics, they start out perfect. A dilemma though whether it would be taking something away from Black America to make it the national anthem for the whole country?

    • I love “Lift Every Voice And Sing” but it’s already doing its job as the Black national anthem. Also, it’s a challenge to sing it, you need to time your breaths!

  3. It’s an interesting idea. No matter if this was attempted through legislation or organically, I imagine the first step would be to have the estate of Bill Withers forgo the copyright of the song. How likely do you think that would be?

      • First off, just the thought of having a “for-profit” national anthem is really unsettling to me. But thinking more of logistics, every public recitation of the national anthem would now have to be licensed. I can’t see this idea being taken seriously without the song being in the public domain.

        • Good point. Maybe we could convince the estate to release it into the public domain? Or maybe the composition, if not the master recording? I have no idea how that would work. All I know is, it’s a better song than the SSB by every conceivable measure.

          • Thank you for continuing to humor me.

            Yes. If the estate released “Lean on Me” to the public domain, copyright law would still protect all recordings. New recordings and performances would not require licensing.

            Ultimately, the two strategies I see to making this idea a reality are:

            1) Lobby the public.

            2) Lobby the copyright holders.

            Lobbying the public would make replacing the SSB just another culture war. I see this going down with the public about as good as anthem kneeling and “defund the police.” That is to say, with good intentions, but divisive at best. I don’t think this is a winning strategy to reach anyone not already steeped in woke culture.

            But if the copyright holders could be convinced of the merits of the project and release the song into the public domain, this idea would have the air of loving goodwill instead of Liberal grievance. Instead of a proposed “replacement” of the SSB, a public-domain “Lean on Me” would be a gift to a fractured country. The song could then organically grow into an alternative national anthem.

            Think of the different headlines: “Twitter Liberals Campaign to Replace the Star-Spangled Banner” versus “Estate of Bill Withers Releases ‘Lean on Me’ into the Public Domain.”

            I’m not talking about a public social media #replacethessb bully campaign. I’m talking about a direct and targeted influence campaign. Surely, if just a few of us exercise our industry contacts, we can start a dialogue directly with the rights holders.

            If this post is just an academic exercise, then pay me no mind. But if this is a real idea, this is how you give it a fighting chance.

            • You and I disagree about the value and effectiveness of “woke culture.” There are plenty of things that used to be widely condemned until “woke culture” began making “divisive” arguments about them: interracial marriage, gay marriage, black people voting, environmental regulations. I predict that as with all of these things, outspoken opposition to police brutality will become similarly mainstream over time (what you describe dismissively as “anthem kneeling.”)

              As for replacing the SSB with “Lean on Me,” it’s an academic thought experiment until it’s not. I don’t know who reads this blog or what the long-term effects are of me posting things on it, but sometimes ideas take on a life of their own. We’ll see what happens to this one.

              • To clarify: I wasn’t dismissive anthem-kneeling. I was just trying to remind you that a large part of the country is dismissive of anthem-kneeling.

                I agree with you that these ideas will become mainstream, but the tactics proponents use to achieve these ideas matter. And we need to be able to critique our own strategy even when the ideas are just. Feeling righteous among our friends is not the same as being effective. We need to include the alienation of opponents to these ideas as metrics in the equation of effectiveness, not just how many minds we win over.

                But for action steps for this idea, I recommend industry people share this article among industry people until an advocate reaches the rightsholders to the song. The rights to the song are what I see as the lynchpin.

                Thanks again,

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