Lyrics
My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims' pride,
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring!
My native country, thee,
Land of the noble free,
Thy name I love;
I love thy rocks and rills,
Thy woods and templed hills;
My heart with rapture thrills,
Like that above.
Let music swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees
Sweet freedom's song;
Let mortal tongues awake;
Let all that breathe partake;
Let rocks their silence break,
The sound prolong.
Our fathers' God, to Thee,
Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing;
Long may our land be bright,
With freedom's holy light;
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God, our King.
Public domain hymn text (written 1831, first published 1832).
The Story Behind the Hymn
Samuel Francis Smith wrote "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" in 1831 while a student at Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. The composer and music educator Lowell Mason had handed Smith a book of German songbooks and asked him to translate some of the texts or write new English words for a few of the melodies. Among them was a stately tune Smith did not immediately recognize as anything more than a pleasant German melody.
Working from that tune, Smith set aside translation altogether and instead wrote an entirely original American patriotic text, reportedly finishing the words in about thirty minutes. What he had not realized — and what became one of the more curious footnotes in American musical history — was that the melody he had chosen was the same one used for "God Save the King," the British royal anthem, a tune whose origins are usually traced to the English composer Henry Carey, though versions of it reach back at least as far as a 1619 keyboard piece.
The hymn received its first public performance on July 4, 1831, at a children's Independence Day celebration at Park Street Church in Boston, and was formally published the following year. For roughly a century afterward, in the absence of any officially designated national anthem, "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" served many of the same ceremonial functions that "The Star-Spangled Banner" would eventually take over when Congress made that anthem official in 1931.
There is a quiet irony built into the hymn's very structure: a song asserting American independence and liberty, sung to the exact melody of the anthem of the monarchy that independence had been won from — the same tune serving, in different hands, as both a hymn to the crown and a hymn against it.
