As we approach the Fourth of July, we will no doubt hear and perhaps even sing a number of patriotic songs. One staple for those of us in the United States of America is the song we know as “America” or “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” The tune for that song has been around for a long time. It has been asserted that it was originally performed July 16, 1607. On that day, Dr. John Bull is said to have played the tune on the organ for none other than King James I, who is best known by us for commissioning the English translation of the Bible that bears his name.
However, the version of this tune we know was first published significantly later, around 1743, in a collection called “Harmonia Anglicana,” which was expanded and republished a couple years later as “Thesaurus Musicus.” In this collection, the tune begins, “God save our Lord the King.” That phrase was already quite popular in the British Empire, so much so that in a majority of the English translations of the Bible from the 1500s including the King James Version, 1 Samuel 10:24 is translated not literally as “Let the king live,” but as, “God save the king.”
Henry Carey is commonly accepted as the author of the originally anonymous work, in no small part due to the claim of his son George Carey in 1795. The younger Carey was noted to have failed to secure a pension and his claim of his father’s authorship was accompanied by a petition to the government for an annual stipend. By that time the tune had become quite well known throughout Europe and the British Empire, and words were soon written in Dutch, Swedish, French, multiple versions in German, and even Russian. In fact, the tune was used as the national anthem of Imperial Russia until 1833 and continues to be used to this day as one of two national anthems by New Zealand. It also inspired Franz Joseph Haydn to write “Austria” as well as influencing Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and many other composers.
It was actually the German version, “Gott Segne Sachsenland” (God Bless Saxony) that inspired Samuel Francis Smith to write the words to “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” Smith was attending Andover Seminary when he took a job translating German songs and materials for the hymn publisher Lowell Mason. He came across the German hymn and, as he puts it, “I instantly felt the impulse to write a patriotic hymn of my own adapted to this tune. Picking up a scrap of paper which lay near me, I wrote at once, probably within half an hour, the hymn ‘America’ as it is now known.”
According to the website Hymnary.org, this tune has been published with at least 65 different texts, and in the Lutheran Service Book we sing it with “God Bless our Native Land,” a translation of “Gott Segne Sachsenland.” Charles Timothy Brooks first had it translated into English in 1834, and it was revised by John Sullivan Dwight a decade later. Interestingly, the version we use in the LSB (#965) credits Brooks with the first stanza and Dwight with the second.
So when you hear these songs this summer, remember to give thanks to God for the gift of music and all blessings we enjoy and pray that God will continue to keep our nation and our leaders under His care.