The story of Hail Columbia is an almost complete contrast with that of Yankee Doodle, the chief point in common being that the music preceded the words. The President's March, probably composed by Philip Phile, a Philadelphia violinist, was popular in 1794 within a year of its production. In 1798 an actor, Gilbert Fox, applied to Joseph Hopkinson, accomplished son of the talented Francis, for a patriotic song adapted to The President's March, to be sung by Fox at a personal benefit performance, for which the prospects of a good house were discouraging. Hopkinson wrote in behalf of a unified country at a moment when, according to Freneau's The Rival Suitors for America, party claims were creating a dangerous rift through conflicting sympathies with France and England. Hail Columbia, as introduced by Fox, was a favourite from the start. It was encored a dozen times. It was repeated at other theatres, and on "circus nights." It was printed in The Porcupine Gazette three days later, 28 April, in the May number of The Philadelphia Magazine, in The Connecticut Courant of 7 May. "Soon no public entertainment was considered satisfactory without it"; and it has continued in use without textual change until the present day.
We owe The Star Spangled Banner to the existence of a long-popular melody and to the inspiration of a thrilling event—the British attack on Fort McHenry, 13 April, 1814. Words and music of To Anacreon in Heaven, constitutional song of the Anacreontic Society in London, were published in 1771. They became so beloved of all convivial souls that the words (with or without the music) were reprinted in twenty-one known magazines and song collections in England between 1780 and 1804, and the melody (with the original or adapted words) was printed no less than thirty times in America between 1796 and 1813. For this tune, in the thrill of the moment of discovery that "the flag was still there," Francis Scott Key began his version of the song "in the dawn's early light," sketched out the remainder on the way to land, copied it on arrival at his Baltimore hotel, and saw it in circulation as a broadside on the next day. At the outset it met with only moderate popularity, being omitted, as a universal favourite never could have been, from many important song books during the next twenty years. Not until the Civil War was it
