"The Star-Spangled Banner" is the national song of the devotion of the United States. When the melody authoritatively turned into the nation's song of praise in 1931, it had been one of America's most well known energetic tunes for over a century. The song of praise's history started the morning of September 14, 1814, when a lawyer and beginner artist named Francis Scott Key viewed U.S. officers—who were under siege from British maritime powers amid the War of 1812—raise an expansive American banner over Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland.
Francis Scott Key stated "The Star Spangled Banner" and its underlying verse on the posterior of a letter while viewing the extensive American banner waving over the stronghold that morning. Back in Baltimore, he kept working until the point when he had finished four verses (just a single is regularly known today).
After a nearby printer issued the tune, initially called "Protection of Fort M'Henry," two Baltimore daily papers printed it, and it spread rapidly to different urban communities along the East Coast.
By November 1812, Key's creation had shown up in print out of the blue under the name "The Star-Spangled Banner."
From Drinking Song to American Anthem
Unexpectedly, the tune Key doled out to go with the verses of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was a mainstream English drinking melody called "To Anacreon in Heaven."
Composed around 1775 by John Stafford Smith, the melody regarded the antiquated Greek writer Anacreon, an admirer of wine. It was initially performed at a London man of his word's music club called the Anacreontic Society.
The Anacreontic Song, as it was known, had a reputation of fame in the United States by 1814. In one celebrated case, safeguards of the beset second president, John Adams, utilized the tune for a melody called "Adams and Liberty."

After the war of 1812, Key proceeded with his flourishing law profession. He filled in as an individual from the "Kitchen Cabinet" of President Andrew Jackson and in 1833 was named as a U.S. lawyer for the District of Columbia.
He made different verses through the span of his life, yet none got anyplace near the acknowledgment of "The Star-Spangled Banner." After contracting pleurisy, Key kicked the bucket in 1843 at 63 years old.
Despite the fact that his commended hymn declared the United States "the place where there is the free," Key was, in reality, a slaveholder from an old Maryland manor family, and as a U.S. lawyer contended a few noticeable bodies of evidence against the abolitionist development.

He spoke out against the brutalities of the organization of subjugation, yet did not consider nullification to be the arrangement.
Rather, Key turned into a pioneer of the colonization development, which pushed the movement of dark slaves to Africa and in the long run brought about the cutting edge country of Liberia.
Developing Popularity of "The Star-Spangled Banner"
At to begin with, "The Star-Spangled Banner" trailed "Yankee Doodle" and "Hail Columbia" in prominence among devoted nineteenth-century tunes. However, amid and quickly after the Civil War, Key's tune picked up a more profound significance, as the American banner turned into an undeniably great image of national solidarity.
By the 1890s, the U.S military had received the melody for stylized purposes, playing it to go with the raising and bringing down of the hues. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson marked an official request assigning it "the national song of the devotion of the United States."
In 1931—over 100 years after it was created—Congress passed a measure announcing "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the official national song of praise.