My Country, ‘Tis of Thee
339

Text: Samuel Francis Smith (1808–1895)
Music: Anonymous ( Thesaurus Musicus, London, 1744)
Tune name: AMERICA

Within the images of this memorable text, the majesty of America’s scenic beauty comes to symbolize America’s heritage of freedom. In four short verses, the word liberty occurs twice, the words free or freedom four times.

In 1829 a man named William C. Woodbridge returned to America from his European travels with a number of German music books. He passed these books on to the noted hymn- writer and musician Lowell Mason. But Mason could not read German either, so he gave them to Samuel F. Smith, at that time a student of theology at Andover, and asked him to translate them. As Smith leafed through the books, he came across a tune that caught his attention immediately. He recalled later, “I think I instantly felt the impulse to write a patriotic hymn of my own adapted to the tune. Picking up a scrap of waste paper which lay near me, I wrote at once, probably within half an hour, the hymn ‘America’ as it is now known everywhere” (quoted in Marilyn Kay Stulken, Hymnal Companion to the Lutheran Book of Worship [Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981], 568–69).

The first performance of the hymn was at an Independence Day celebration in a Boston, Massachusetts, church in 1831. A year later, it was included in a collection of church music published by Lowell Mason.

The melody that had so attracted Smith was matched with a patriotic German text in the book he was perusing. Smith was probably unaware that the tune had also served for patriotic hymns in Danish, Dutch, French, Swiss, Russian, and Austrian versions. It had also been matched to an English text in the 1740s that was to become the national hymn of Great Britain.

J. Spencer Cornwall noted that “the imagery of the hymn is not that of America as a whole, but only that part east of the Alleghenies northward where the author lived. Woods and templed hills, for example, certainly does not portray the plains of the middle states or the mountains of the west. But the universal passion for ‘sweet freedom, sweet land of liberty,’ and God’s mighty protection forever with which the hymn is imbued, makes it a vital, living essence of patriotism” (Stories of Our Mormon Hymns, 122).

Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Harvard classmate and close friend of Samuel Smith, made this comment: “He wrote ‘My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.’ If he had said ‘our,’ the hymn would not have been immortal, but that ‘my’ was a master stroke. Everyone who sings the song at once feels a personal ownership in his native land. The hymn will last as long as the country” (quoted in C. A. Browne, The Story of Our National Ballads [New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1919], 75).