Then I started thinking about the song, and I realized that nobody has ever told me that they love the song. What is its true heritage? It took 117 years from the time that Francis Scott Key wrote the poem for it to become the national anthem and I wondered, why the lag and why did Congress pass the anthem law in 1931. I remember sitting in that department library and the thought entered my head: “The Star-Spangled Banner” is an historic song, it’s hiding in plain sight. program at Stony Brook University and I needed a topic for a seminar paper.

What first piqued your interest in the national anthem and doing that level of research about it? The process took several years, but that was the mother lode. I picked out the best material and distilled it into this book.

If you piled them up they’d probably come up to my thigh. At one point I realized that I shouldn’t just write things down and decided to make copies for later reference. and in Baltimore, Maryland which is the home of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and amassed a pile of papers. I hit all the major archives in Washington D.C. I spent a number of years, though there was an intensive three months thanks to a Smithsonian Institution fellowship. When I was reading through your book, I was really impressed with the amount of detail you were able to find regarding “The Star-Spangled Banner.” How long did you spend researching it? We spoke to Ferris about his exhaustive research, the origins of the song, little-known facts about the anthem and a whole lot more. To commemorate its bicentennial, historian Marc Ferris wrote the “ Star-Spangled Banner: The Unlikely History Of America’s National Anthem,” a comprehensive account of the song’s story. It’s been over two centuries since of the Battle of Baltimore and Francis Scott Key’s resulting poem, titled “The Defense of Fort M’Henry.” In the many years since its creation, that poem became popularized as “The Star-Spangled Banner” and is now enshrined as our national anthem.

The star spangled banner song rock