Anacreontic

The Georgetown lawyer and future D.C. district attorney didn’t write the lyrics on the back of an envelope — he had days stuck on his truce ship to compose it at a writing desk — and he consciously wrote it to the already familiar melody of “The Anacreontic Song,” the anthem of the London club of the same name which was already a popular template for America’s songwriters.

As a musicologist, he has the vocabulary to bring melodies and specific performances alive with words, a skill he deftly uses to parse examples as diverse as the tune of the Anacreontic Song and Jimi Hendrix’s epic “Banner” performance at Woodstock.

This was not a “drinking song” but, rather, an intentionally challenging piece ritualistically performed at each meeting of the Anacreontic Society since its composition for that purpose in the 18th century.

Around 1776, the English composer John Stafford Smith wrote the tune “To Anacreon in Heaven” for the Anacreontic Society, a British gentlemen’s club that gathered regularly for dinners and concerts.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, “The Anacreontic Song” emerged as a vehicle for voicing partisanship in the new United States.