Sunday, July 4, 2010

The Glorious Fourth





To celebrate, let's all sing together the anthem we had unofficially before the Star Spangled Banana; viz., Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean:



and before that, although with no words: the first anthem, the Presidential March, Hail Columbia


and for completeness, the present anthem, 1st and 4th verses.  (What?  You mean there's more than one?)

Lastly, because I like it, America the Beautiful.  Normally, I dislike song stylings, which this singer does by speaking some of the lines (pfui, sez I) but this is the only version I found at youtube that had the correct choruses for each verse.  "God shed his grace on thee" can thus be seen by parallelism with the other choruses to be a plea in the imperative mode and not a statement of fact in the past tense. 

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