United States National Anthem — The Star-Spangled Banner

"The Star-Spangled Banner" was born from a single, dramatic night. In September 1814, during the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key watched the British navy bombard Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbour. Through the smoke and "the rockets' red glare", he could not tell who had won — until dawn revealed the enormous American flag still flying over the fort.

The famous first verse turns that moment into the anthem's whole meaning. It is written as an anxious question — "O say, can you see… does that star-spangled banner yet wave?" — and the answer, the flag still there at first light, becomes a symbol of survival and defiance. The closing line, "the land of the free and the home of the brave", fixes that resilience as the nation's self-image.

Key actually wrote four verses, but it is this opening stanza, ending on a question, that Americans sing.

Francis Scott Key wrote the words in 1814; the melody is older still, taken from "The Anacreontic Song", composed around 1773 by John Stafford Smith for a London gentlemen's club. The pairing circulated for over a century before Congress made it the official national anthem in 1931. Its famously wide vocal range — a full octave and a half — makes it one of the more challenging anthems to sing.

Few songs are as woven into public life as "The Star-Spangled Banner", performed before American sporting events, ceremonies and civic gatherings. Over the years its renditions — from Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock guitar version to Whitney Houston's Super Bowl performance — have themselves become cultural landmarks, and the anthem has repeatedly sat at the centre of national conversations about patriotism and protest.

"The Star-Spangled Banner" is the national anthem of the United States, officially adopted on 3 March 1931. It belongs to the world's family of national anthems.

Its words were written by the lawyer and poet Francis Scott Key in 1814, and set to the tune of "The Anacreontic Song" by John Stafford Smith. Because both the lyrics and melody are long out of copyright, the anthem is in the public domain.