![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() When her kids were growing up, the only singing Hutchings did was around the house for them. Her husband, a mail carrier, and her two children, a 21-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son, tell her she’s patriotic, but Hutchings said that label has only come recently. “I hear or sing it and I would tear up thinking about the soldiers fighting or what my stepfather went through, or what my grandfather might have gone through.” “That song touched my heart, tugged at me,” Hutchings said. She doesn’t consider herself a patriot, but she felt a connection to it, maybe because her grandfather served in the military during the Korean War, her stepfather returned from Vietnam with post traumatic stress disorder and her husband, Michael Hutchings, served in the Navy for eight years. “I’m fascinated with the song, what it’s written about,” Hutchings said. None of that is news to Hutchings, who learned about the song on her own. People began referring to the song as "The Star-Spangled Banner,” and while Woodrow Wilson had first recommended in 1916 that it be played at all public events, it wasn’t adopted as the U.S. It was later printed in newspapers and eventually set to the music of a popular English drinking song called "To Anacreon in Heaven" by composer John Stafford Smith. It prompted Key to write the poem known as “The Defence of Fort McHenry,” exactly 200 years ago today. He had watched that powerful naval force bomb that outpost all night long, and when morning came, the fort’s American flag was still waving. That man, Francis Scott Key, an attorney, was working as a prisoner-exchange negotiator on a British ship in the Baltimore harbor watching the British Navy attack Fort McHenry during the War of 1812 when he wrote it. It should be heard a cappella for people to grasp that song and what the man stood for when he wrote it.” I don’t think people should make it their own. “That’s my personal belief, how I feel that song should be sung. “I feel people can hear and embrace the words when it’s sung a cappella,” Hutchings said. ![]()
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