Sing the anthem, don’t perform it.

It bothers me every time I go to a Braves game. I cringe at the first note, and I shudder at the first warble. And this past week, with bowl games inviting everyone from Hannah Montana to Frankie Valli to sing, and often butcher, the Star Spangled Banner, it’s gotten to me more and more.

There’s a right way to sing the National Anthem. It doesn’t involve jazz chords, blue notes and descant improvisations. It doesn’t involve vocal gymnastics, tearful melodrama, and yodeling, urban or bucolic. It doesn’t involve flashy costumes, thirty second cadenzas, and a funky back-beat. There is a right way: the way that allows fifty thousand people to join in singing.

Don’t get me wrong; putting a little…spin on the song can be pleasing enough, in the right circumstances. On a CD, perhaps, or at a theatrical venue, such as the [Nauseatingly Endless] Awards Ceremonies in Hollywood or New York. But not at sporting events. Sporting events belong to us, the common citizens. It’s not about the singer. It’s about the song.

Let me put it to you this way: have you ever been at a ballgame, maybe when a military band plays the National Anthem? Or when someone simply sings it straight, without the frills? Fifty or sixty thousand people join in, some beautifully, some heroically off-key, blending their voices together in a crescendo for the words “O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave”, and complimenting the big finish with a round of applause that includes and acknowledges every single soul in the grandstand. It’s something no singing star, not Whitney, nor Mariah, nor even Elvis himself, can upstage.

That’s the right way to sing the National Anthem.

E Pluribus Unum; from many, one. From many disparate individual voices, one song.