One of my daughters sings the Star Spangled Banner a Capella. She is young, and has a high voice, and just recently learned the words to the song in her school choir. We also found a version on U Tube that printed the lyrics on our computer screen karaoke style.
She practiced this over and over at home, and as I ran through the exercise of doing this myself yesterday, I realized that although I've always known what a hard song this is to sing - It's all over the place vocally, up and down the scale, jumping great steps back and forth, twisting over the consonants. Then late in the song, it rises even higher, sending any singer into the top of their range.
This young lady had sang it with her group at a a school basketball game, and she often breaks into song - her voice is her own personal instrument. But recently, in a noisy group of 25 people or so, she asked a cousin if they wanted to hear her sing it. She started singing while everyone was talking, and gradually, the whole room fell quiet as everyone began listening to her.
She can sing it spot on, pitch perfect, and not miss a note. And it's high, and she doesn't break anywhere. She sang it this way from her corner of that room of people, and everyone stopped to listen to her. When she was done, there was applause, and my brother sort of got down on one knee and begged me to let her sing it at my dad's memorial service.
Well, she's never sang by herself in a group of two hundred people before, so we didn't want to put her on the spot in the middle of the service, but we told her she could sing it at the open mike time when people were eating and greeting after the service. There was a lot else going on, and no one spent much time thinking about it in the meantime. But after everything else was said and done, when no one else in the room had the floor, she told me she was ready to sing it. We had to find someone to turn the microphone on, and she sang a few notes to see if it was going through the mike.
It took the third little blow-in to hear the sound behind us, and I gave her the pitch a little higher than I ever would normally, modulating for a little clarification, and then too late realized it might pitch her up too high near the end of the song. But she just started belting it out clearly, as she always does.
This room had a hundred people in it or so and everyone was talking at the time, but once again the quiet moved across the room like a wave, not a hush really - just a contagious silence. Not tall, not up on stage, the little one sang our Star Spangled Banner in the sweetest, clearest voice - a bright angel, calmly, joyously. When she climbed to "the rockets red glare," her voice didn't break at all at the top of her range - it was strong, and thrilling. She had done it once again. Everyone applauded.
There has been some debate on pop stars and the singing of this song at public events lately, but I haven't heard a better rendition of the number than by this sweet child that day. Some things just don't need to be over-embellished. Sometimes music can say things we have no other way to say.
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