For all you patriots, a little test

All right, you patriotic Americans, here’s a little test of your national pride.

Take a couple of minutes right now and see if you can sing your way through the National Anthem.

And no, you can’t Google the words. That would be cheating.

Go ahead and sing, recite, whatever. I’ll wait. I’ve got nowhere else to go at the moment …

OK, time’s up.

So how’d you do? Did you make it through the whole song without once stumbling over those nasty ramparts, or maybe mixing up a couple of the phrases?

If so, congratulations on being in the vast minority.

According to a Harris poll, two out of three American adults don’t know all the words to the song. Many, in fact, don’t even know that the anthem’s name is “The Star-Spangled Banner” or how it came to be written.

When asked by pollsters what line follows “whose broad stripes and bright stars,” for example, most people replied incorrectly. Instead of “through the perilous fight,” about 35 percent of respondents mistakenly said “were so gallantly streaming,” and about 20 percent supplied the phrase “gave proof through the night.”

The National Association for Music Education, which believes every American should be able to sing the song unhaltingly, as well as know some of the story behind it, is on a mission to teach us just that – or reteach us, as it were.

The group has launched The National Anthem Project, which has been touring the country since January and will make stops in each state. The education initiative is expected to roll into Portland on Oct. 2-3, its only scheduled Maine visit.

The project is certainly an ambitious one, considering the daunting task at hand. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is, as most of us know from experience, one of the most unsingable songs ever written.

As one vocal coach from the Juilliard School explained in a recent New York Times story about the awkward anthem, “It’s rangy, it has that legato phrase on a high note, the climax ends on a high note with a bad vowel, and the word setting is bad at some crucial spots.”

Not only that, he complained, but its lowest note, at “say” in the first line, is an entire octave and a half below its highest notes, which come at “red glare” and “free.”

Which is why the anthem can instill fear in the heart of just about anyone who attempts to perform it in front of large gatherings. The list of high-profile blunders is long, indeed, which is why the song is so often prerecorded and lip-synced these days.

Robert Goulet, for instance, botched it famously in Lewiston back in 1965, before the much-anticipated boxing rematch of Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston.

“Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early night,” he crooned, an embarrassing error that he was not allowed to forget for the rest of his career.

The comedian Roseanne Barr, at a baseball game in San Diego in 1990, not only tortured the tune and its words but embellished the anthem like no one had before by grabbing her crotch and spitting. Former President George Bush panned the screeching performance as “disgusting” and “a disgrace.”

For those who don’t remember, or perhaps never knew, the song was written as a poem by Francis Scott Key in 1814, on the back of a letter, after he had gazed at the American flag surrounded by smoke and flames during a battle with the British at Fort McHenry.

The story goes that a relative of Key put the poem to the tune of “To Anacreon of Heaven,” a popular English drinking song of the time. After years of performances at military and sporting events, the song became America’s official anthem in 1931.

Ever since, there have been attempts to get rid of the bellicose song and replace it with a song that has an easier tune and a less elusive lyric. “God Bless America” has long had its supporters for the honor of national anthem, as does “America the Beautiful.”

Neither effort has gotten very far in usurping “The Star-Spangled Banner” – which actually has four verses, by the way, none of which ever mentions America – and likely never will. Elevating a song with the line “God shed His grace on Thee” to anthem status would surely provoke a lawsuit from the same people who want to banish “In God We Trust” from our money and “One nation under God” from our Pledge of Allegiance.

Like it or not, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is probably here to stay. So go ahead and Google the words if you need to, and find out how they’re supposed to read. Who knows, but maybe with a little practice you might actually nail the song once and for all.

You certainly couldn’t do any worse than Roseanne.