Star Spangled Songbook: A History in Sheet Music of "The Star-Spangled Banner." eds. by Mark Clague and Andrew Kuster (review)

The Star Spangled Songbook, edited by Mark Clague and Andrew Kuster, offers a rare combination of scholarly erudition, accessibility, and practical value. This collection of seventy-three songs is equal parts critical edition, teaching resource, and performance-ready score. As Michael Scott on NBC's sitcom The Office might have described it, the volume is a "win-win-win." Born out of Clague's desire to produce a usable recording of The Star-Spangled Banner and its melodic source (a British tune called The Anacreontic Song) for the undergraduate classroom, the songbook proj ect expanded significantly as he was lured by the manifold historical transformations of the tune as well as of Francis Scott Key's famous text. The end result is a richly textured exploration of the intersections between American political and musical history from the late eighteenth century to the present.

The songbook itself comprises ten thematic sections that trace a loosely chronological path. Clague's cogent introductory essay provides rationales for his selections, and a detailed road map for following the book's course. The first four sections precede Key's composition of the The Star-Spangled Banner text. These sections include works by The Anacreontic Song composer John Stafford Smith (1750–1836), drinking and fraternal parodies of the song, early American political parodies of the song, and other American patriotic songs like William Billings's Chester and Joseph Hopkinson's Hail Columbia, which served as the country's de facto national anthem throughout the nineteenth century. Sections five and six concentrate on Francis Scott Key (1779–1843), with several settings and arrangements of The Star-Spangled Banner, including a martial rendition by James Hewitt (1770–1827), and settings of other Key texts. The next three sections take a more distinctly political turn with The Star-Spangled Banner contrafacta composed on such topics as abolition, secession (during the Civil War), and labor. The final section focuses on The Star-Spangled Banner as the United States national anthem—not codified by law until 1931. In all cases, the selections are judicious, and the sections are generally balanced in size and scope. The small section three, however, might have benefited from the inclusion of patriotic contrafacta of famous tunes like God Save the King and Derry Down, both of which traversed the landscape of broadside balladry alongside The Star-Spangled Banner throughout the period (see Glenda Goodman, "Musical Sleuthing in Early America: 'Derry Down' and the XYZ Affair," CommonPlace 13, no. 2 [Winter 2013], http://www.common-place-archives.org/vol-13/no-02/goodman/ [accessed 18 May 2017]). Another famous tune from the era, Yankee Doodle, appears in section five of the volume as an anonymous 1814 contrafactum, The Battle of Baltimore.

Contrafacting was a ubiquitous practice in the English-speaking public throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the most fulfilling journey one might take in the Star Spangled Songbook might follow the contrafacta of the tune Americans would recognize more or less as the national anthem. I use this clumsy phrase because the songbook makes clear that The Anacreontic Song was the source of several parody contrafacta, including The Star-Spangled Banner, while The Star-Spangled Banner itself became a new source text for later contrafacta. Anyone unfamiliar with the anthem's origins in drinking songs might be surprised to see the words "We ask not if matter and spirit can join / We find them combin...