Shea: National anthem carries weighty history

It’s Saturday morning and Jeff Jimerson walks onto the ice at Mellon Arena to belt out… It’s Saturday morning and Jeff Jimerson walks onto the ice at Mellon Arena to belt out the national anthem for yet another Penguins’ game.

As a lukewarm Pens fan, Jimerson’s bio is as unfamiliar to me as cross checks and high-sticking. But judging by his neatly parted, slightly poofy blonde hair and black turtleneck, I’m predicting a corny rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” complete with vocal acrobatics and added octaves simply because Jimerson — like most others who sing the national anthem for crowds of people — can.

I’m cringing and prepping myself for an “American Idol” moment of self-indulgent singing, but Jimerson goes against the grain and doesn’t turn into a patriotic diva on ice. He instead gives a straightforward, but still impressive, performance without hanging excessive bells and whistles on every hook and note of the song. I was actually a little taken aback by Jimerson. It had been a while since I heard the anthem sung as it was written (or at least close). It’s a bit abnormal in our society these days.

To be fair, by nature “The Star-Spangled Banner” is bound to attract to some diva singers. It’s an infamously difficult song to sing, and those who can sing it really want you know that they can really sing it.

Singer Darryl Reed kindly tried to explain the situation by saying, “The national anthem is kind of a hard song to sing sometimes, and God gave me the strength to put it together.”

Divine bestowment aside, there is a sort of artistic challenge to be met in singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A singer has to have a range of about two to two-and-a-half octaves to make their way through the low “Oh say can you see,” to the high “rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air.”

Mariah Carey notably holds the Guinness World Record for hitting the highest note (a G7#) and ranging five — rather than the traditional two — octaves over the course of the anthem.

Ironically enough, 50 years ago Carey’s patriotic performance would not have been met with cheers and an induction into a book of world records, but rather a whole lot of trouble, possibly some legal consequences and maybe even a random projectile or two thrown in her general direction.

People used to get quite riled at any alteration of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Before the ’60s, reinterpreting it was essentially the same as cutting up an American flag and making a napkin out of it — downright treasonous.

The influential Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky learned not to tamper with “The Star-Spangled Banner” the hard way in 1940, when he led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in an unusual rendition of the national anthem. Shortly after the show, he was arrested for the violation of federal law that prohibited the reharmonization of the national anthem.

Jose Feliciano ran into similar trouble when he sang an acoustic, bluesy folk version of the national anthem at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium before game five of the 1968 World Series. Feliciano wasn’t cuffed and dragged to prison like Stravinsky, but his performance did cause quite an uproar. NBC reported people across the country hurling shoes at their TV sets and veterans across the nation were all in a huff.

Feliciano’s performance, which took place just 10 months before Jimi Hendrix’s legendary Woodstock rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was controversial, but it did crack open the door of interpretation. Performers such as Hendrix and Aerosmith —the latter replaced the lyrics ‘home of the brave’ with ‘home of the Indianapolis 500’ —caught some heat for shaking things up, but not nearly to the degree that Feliciano did.

And so, the road for modern renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was paved for Mariah Carey and similar vocal overachievers and their interpretations of the national anthem.

That’s not to say all standards have fallen through the cracks of our society and that anything is fair game. Bart Simpson drew a line when he wrote on the chalkboard, “I will not belch the National Anthem” in the second season of “The Simpsons,” and George W. Bush similarly set a bar-lowering standard saying “the national anthem ought to be sung in English” in April 2006 after it was simultaneously sung in Spanish by 500 radio stations.

Even well after the ’60s, TV favorite Roseanne Barr invoked public outrage at a perfomance in 1990 by intentionally singing off-key and grabbing her crotch before a game.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” has come a long way since Francis Scott Key wrote it while staring at the flag in the midst of the battle of Fort McHenry, but I like to think it has evolved alongside the country. From tough and gloriously rebellious to bedazzled and prettied-up? Yeah, that sounds about right. God bless America.