10 star-spangled facts to share at your Fourth of July barbecue

Karl Merton Ferron / Baltimore Sun

It was originally called "The Defence of Fort M'Henry" by the printer who first published the words, but that title never caught on. Publisher Thomas Carr of Baltimore called it "The Star Spangled Banner," a phrase repeated in all four verses, which reflects the emerging importance of the flag as a national symbol. Today's accepted spelling is with a hyphen, which follows the style Key used repeatedly in his manuscript.

Lloyd Fox / Baltimore Sun

During the Civil War, the federal government imprisoned pro-Confederacy newspaper publisher Francis Key Howard at Fort McHenry in an effort to stop the spread of Confederate sympathy in Maryland.

Christopher T. Assaf / Baltimore Sun

Key was born in what is now Carroll County and died at his sister's house in Baltimore in 1843. His body now rests at the base of a large statue at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Frederick.

Barbara Haddock Taylor / Baltimore Sun

The Star-Spangled Banner's melody is modeled off of the song "To Anacreon in Heaven," a sly 1700s song about drinking and sex — it's hard to mistake the line "I'll instruct you, like me to entwine; The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine" for anything else.

Christopher T. Assaf / Baltimore Sun

Key, a slave-holding southerner whose family supported the Confederacy, wrote the Union anthem and an anti-slavery northerner, Daniel Decatur Emmett, wrote Dixie, the anthem used by the South.

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The English playwright wrote "by spangled star-light sheen" in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "what Stars do Spangle heaven with such beauty?" in "The Taming of the Shrew."

Baltimore Sun

In the Baltimore baseball team's inaugural season, 1954, general manager Arthur Ehlers banned playing the anthem. He planned to save it for special occasions, as he believed frequent repetition "tends to cheapen the song and lessen the thrill of response." The City Council passed a resolution condemning the stoppage, and in the span of a week, Ehlers relented.

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Ragtime performers in the 1890s and 1930s jazz bands also played versions of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that raised an uproar. Aretha Franklin and Jose Feliciano delivered individualistic versions of the song almost a year before Hendrix's incendiary Woodstock version.