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.