In the book "Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation, which McGraw co-authored with historian Jon Meacham, McGraw calls the hymn the "hallmark of truly great art" because of how it has evolved alongside the country itself.
McGraw also points to the song's remarkable versatility. Heard simply on a piano, he says, it "feels like a hymn, something I might've sung in church as a boy." Performed with a full orchestra, however, it becomes "regal and majestic, a song worthy of presidential inaugurations."
Originally written by Samuel Francis Smith in 1831 while he was a student at Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, "My Country 'Tis of Thee" borrowed the melody of the British anthem "God Save the King." Rather than celebrating a monarch, Smith transformed the familiar tune into a distinctly American hymn centered on liberty and national identity.
"We do it because it works," he writes. "Listeners, almost unknowingly, recognize an emotion from the past while clinging to the modern message."
Abolitionists even created alternate versions condemning slavery before the Civil War, while the original hymn was reportedly sung by newly emancipated people after the Emancipation Proclamation. More than a century later, Martin Luther King Jr. famously concluded his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech by invoking its enduring refrain: "Let freedom ring."
"Samuel Francis Smith took things to an even higher level by appropriating 'God Save the King' for American hearts and voices," he writes. "'My Country 'Tis of Thee' was really about putting not a monarch but the nation itself, and the ideas on which it's founded and with which it endures, at the center of our imaginative lives."
"What we say as a people, and what we sing as a people, matters, for even if we fall short of the ideal, we've got to keep that ideal in front of us, like a beacon through the darkness," McGraw writes. "'My Country 'Tis of Thee' is one of those beacons."
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