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American Idol's Siobhan Magnus bombs National Anthem at Quincy political rally
By dwyer on Sat, 10/30/2010 - 9:33pm
Siobhan Magnus, who was the sixth place finalist on the ninth season of American Idol, is a local girl from Barnstable. Today she made the trip to Quincy to join Joe Biden, John Kerry, Vicki Kennedy and other prominent Democrats in a rally for Norfolk District Attorney William Keating, who is hoping to take over the seat being vacated by Rep. William Delahunt.
She was terrible.
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Comments
You are terrible
Having just listened to the performance on YouTube, I can conclusively say that you have no idea what you're talking about.
She was pitch perfect and did a great job.
My only complaint is one I make of nearly anyone who sings our national anthem for the past 20+ years (seemingly ever since Whitney got her hands on it): It's not a funeral dirge. There's no reason to turn it into a 3 minute (or longer sometimes) song. It can be sung perfectly fine with a slightly up-tempo beat and moves nicely through each stanza. Stop stretching it out like each note requires tenacious gripping, haunting melody in and of itself.
National Anthem Never Meant for Singing
The song and the tune were not designed for singing, let alone solo singing. The whole piece is atrocious as anything but a orchestral work. The only singers who make any sense of it are ensembles like Boys2Men or barbershop quartets that have a range of ranges to work with. Otherwise, it isn't the singers that suck - it is the anthem itself.
I have long thought we should switch to This Land is Your Land, which is far more accessible and has vastly more to do with what makes America great than some kludgy bit of glorification of a few historically insignificant hours of violence.
Yay!
My favorite part about This Land Is Your Land is that Woody Guthrie wrote it because he disliked God Bless America. I have always hated that song, and that felt like vindication.
Interestingly, I first learned This Land is Your Land at a provincial park in Canada, and so the Canadian version still of the chorus still comes to mind first for me.
This all said, I really love The Star-Spangled Banner but I don't like when singers don't just sing it straight. It's the national anthem, not vocal showcase time.
Back when the melody to SSB was written....
...ordinary educated folks could sing it as a multi-part choral anthem.
Wasn't Star-Spangled Banner originally an English drinking song?
Not the lyrics, but the tune -- something people would sing in a pub.
Not exactly a pub song
The original song was written to celebrate a Greek poet (Anacreon) by a society of amateur musicians in London in the 18th century as their official song, "The Anacreontic Song". While the song celebrates drinking (wine primarily) and other bawdy topics, as Anacreon's poems often did, it wasn't exactly just a drinking song like "Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum" or anything.
Francis Scott Key's brother noticed that the Defense of Fort McHenry poem and the Anacreontic Song matched up well and the pairing became popular here in the States until it finally became our anthem.
The original song was a celebration of the Greek poet and an up-beat honorarium to his poems' Bacchanal nature. Here's an example of it being sung appropriately. Under a minute. Boom. Done.