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Thanks to the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture, whose Lapidus Initiative supported my participation in the Scholars' Workshop of 2015. The Omohundro editorial staff and the five other fantastic co-participants provided invaluable advice on this article. Hearty thanks as well to Douglas Shadle and Emily Abrams Ansari for their thoughtful comments. I presented an earlier iteration of this article at the American Musicological Society Meeting in New Orleans in 2012.
Men and women in eighteenth-century America could scarcely avoid the tune "God Save the King." Nor did they want to. The song circulated widely, frequently set with new lyrics that changed the focus from the original "God save great George our King" to topical themes. In the period during and after the Revolution, new lyrics were often explicitly political and politicized. The first item in American soldier Joseph Kendal's manuscript collection of song lyrics from 1783 was a setting of "God Save the King" that began "God save America, / Free from Despotic Sway, / Till Time shall cease." A year earlier the eleven-year-old Albany native Elizabeth Van Rensselaer transcribed a keyboard arrangement of "God Save the King" titled "God save great Washington" not once, but twice, in two different keys.1The political uses of the song continued after the Revolution. On 17 October 1795, readers of the Philadelphia Minerva found "[God Save the] Rights of Woman" by an anonymous lady.2In short, "God Save the King" was ubiquitous in the colonial and early national period. Appropriations of the tune were not necessarily respectful of the British anthem, and the multiple sets of lyrics often represented disagreeing points of view, but the tune was certainly popular.
"God Save the King" is an illuminating case study of the relationship between political songs and the historical events surrounding the American Revolution--a case study that calls into question just how important the Revolution was as a marker of cultural change and invites a reconsideration of what "American" music signified in this period.3By tracing "God Save the King" contrafacta through six decades, from its composition in the 1740s to its embrace by English colonists in the 1750s and 60s through its widespread use by rival political factions the 1790s, I am able...