![]() Written by British composer John Stafford Smith-whose identity was discovered only in the 1970s by a librarian in the music division of the Library of Congress-the song was sung to signal a transition between the evening’s orchestral music concert and after-dinner participatory singing. Long assumed to have originated as a drinking song, the melody was taken from the song “ To Anacreon in Heaven,” which first surfaced about 1776 as a club anthem of the Anacreontic Society, an amateur mens’ music club in London. After a century of general use, the four-stanza song was officially adopted as the national anthem by an act of Congress in 1931. The Star-Spangled Banner, national anthem of the United States, with music adapted from the anthem of a singing club and words by Francis Scott Key.
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