Rocking In The Free World
Gotta love the condescending tone. You don’t know who you’re talking to.
Anyway, well, you’re wrong. Most music theory classes will contain elements of singing in them, and you don’t need individual voice lessons to learn how to use your range. There are also ear-training classes (not “voice lessons”) from any number of community colleges and universities. Also, you don’t need two octaves, only a perfect twelfth. A “hair over an octave” is already almost enough; people just need to trust that they can do it and and try it. But the bottom line is, the music classes that used to be taught regularly in elementary school are more than enough to learn what one needs to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” well.
A minimal amount of musical literacy and a little bit of confidence is enough. What’s most hilarious about all this is that the “Star-Spangled Banner” was written to be sung to the tune of a fucking popular drinking song! It’s difficulty has obviously increased over the years. Somehow, drunk non-musicians all over England and America could sing it just fine back in 1812.
Anyway, obviously, you don’t need voice lessons or university classes to sing our national anthem. You also certainly don’t need a classical-trained voice as an adult. Most people who can sing it confidently didn’t have them, outside of what they got in elementary school. What’s lacking for most people in singing our anthem is confidence that they can do it. The main problem is that people are afraid of messing it up, because people all over the place yak about “how hard it is.”
Go ahead and and try! Who cares if you mess it up? You’ll get it if you try, and little mistakes don’t matter; you’re singing it in a crowd anyway! Also, as I said earlier, switching octaves works wonders. If you can match pitch in the first place, you can switch octaves.
Lastly, and frankly, the people who aren’t going to sing our beautiful and stirring national anthem well aren’t going to sing “America the Beautiful” well, either.
So, why did make the quasi-facetious remark about “taking music classes”? Because I’m sick of so much lamenting that stems directly from total, rampant musical illiteracy, and people not realizing at all that they can do something about it.
Bruce Springsteen’s “No Surrender”.
Should we change the flag to orange and white too? 
America the Beautiful is about the great things in this country, and it doesn’t list a battle or war as one of those great things. A national anthem should be about more than “we’re gonna kick your ass”.
“The Shot Heard 'Round The World” from Schoolhouse Rock. It’s catchy, it’s patriotic, and it’s educational. And as a bonus, it shows how a well-regulated militia keeping and bearing arms was necessary to the security of a free state. 
Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?
Why not? It’s a freaking epic catchy tune.
I should also be more than sentimental, religious tripe with a banal melody.
America the Beautiful. American beauty and no mention of war…
Freebird.
It only took 90 posts! 
Imagine by John Lennon
Except for the heroes proved in liberating strife part.
Just checked the poll results, and I’m surprised by how many Dopers want to make a song with an explicit religious basis the national anthem.
That factor is the killer for me, along with the SSB being a fine anthem (its overuse at sporting events not withstanding).
Well, the Star Spangled Banner mentions God too:
So that’s pretty clearly claiming divine protection, right there. But it doesn’t really bother me. It’s not like ours is the only anthem mentioning God. I mean, the British national anthem is “God Save the Queen”. The New Zealand national anthem is “God Defend New Zealand”. Those are more explicitly about God than either our current anthem or “America the Beautiful”.
I can’t stand the SSB - I’ve had singing lessons but it’s still unsingable tripe - so I voted for America the Beautiful.
However, I think the Russians have the best anthem musically - I’m not Russian and I don’t know what they’re singing about (well, Russia obviously) but it makes my eyes well up and my heart swell with pride. That’s some good anthemy music right there, especially in the last verse with the brass fanfares.
I thought you meant this one, which is even catchier.
Although if we’re doing Rockapella tunes there’s always Capital.
Which leads to this.
It’s like TV Tropes for songs today.
Almost all national anthems are either solemn hymns or tinny military marches (or sometimes what sounds like a hybrid of both). They leave me cold, with a few exceptions. I appreciate ones that break from the usual clichés.
I’m partial to the “National Anthem” of Azerbaijan. I’ve never checked out the lyrics. I’ve only heard instrumental arrangements of it rendered in MIDI format. For all I know, the lyrics say “Our nation is glorious for the blood and guts of our enemies dripping from our red swords! Yay us!” Well, I certainly hope not. But all I can tell you is the melody is awesome. It sounds like a song song instead of just another clichéd anthem. It sounds like something Aleksandr Borodin might have written.
The national anthem of Bangladesh (“Shonar Bangla” ‘golden Bengal’) is distinct. The tune is a gently flowing sort of barcarole. The melody just sort of wanders around unstructured, with phrases of varying length, and runs through a number of themes without repeating them, but the different themes all share some common melodic elements. A very different way of putting a song together. The lyrics are from a poem by the great Rabindranath Tagore, in praise of the country’s beauty. I like it for being so different from the ordinary, and its literary credentials are second to none.
The national anthem of Laos (“Peng Sat Lao” ‘song of the Lao people’) sounds like a song song too, which I like. The pentatonic melody could as easily be Gaelic as Asian, comin’ thro’ the rye.
ha ha, you very funny. now hear real one.
Actually, the real one doesn’t do anything for me. At least the satire Kazakh anthem elicited lively comments like this one:
Correction: Last week in this thread we ran an item erroneously stating that Katharine Lee Bates was president of Wellesley College. In fact, she was a professor of English literature at Wellesley. The editorial staff at The Daily Johanna regrets our mistake. The SDMB community is usually quite good at catching and correcting silly factual errors like that. You’re letting me down here, Dopers.
America the Beautiful is a beautiful song, but to much geography and God in in there too. People are pissed because we have in God We Trust on our money.
The Star Spangled Banner has the greatest ending to all the songs listed - the land of the free and the home of the brave.
I know! I was dead sure I was gonna have to write it in and I’d be the only one for it. Yay for being wrong!
Ezzackly. The Internationale was written to commemorate the Paris Commune, which was the 19th century’s biggest act of class hatred, and the full version in the original French has got references to saving your bullets for your own generals and such like. Class hatred is the soul of the Internationale.
Urgh, that version… I like this one a little better, I feel it’s a little more polished.
That’s Putin’s recycled version of the old Soviet national anthem. (Hardly surprising, considering where he worked before the Wall fell.) For most of the 90s and a bit of the following decade they used an excerpt from a work of Glinka’s which I thought rather beautiful, myself.
And, just for a little bit of a mindbender, both the Star-Spangled Banner and the Hymn of the Soviet Union can be sung to the tune of The Irish Washerwoman. Which means that, with just the slightest modification, the tunes and the words to both songs are interchangeable.