Constant Sorrow

Coming to terms with our racist musical heritage.

- Michael Mechanic

LAST WINTER, about 10 months before Donald Trump managed to revive Colin Kaepernick’s protest movement and set off a fresh debate on race, patriotism, and the emotional stability of the president, Ben Hunter was asked to perform “The Star-Spangled Banner” for a crowd of about 600 people. The occasion was the annual conference of Citizen University, a nonprofit run by former Clinton White House adviser Eric Liu—Hunter was the event’s musician-in-residence. But the anthem request gave him pause.

Hunter, 32, is biracial and identifies as black. He took up classical violin at age five and now, as part of a Seattle-based duo with banjo player Joe Seamons, makes his living researching and performing old-time American music. So he knew a bit about the anthem’s dark past.

At first he said he’d do it if he could sing the whole song— including the verse in which slave owner Francis Scott Key, an outspoken white supremacist, rails against “the hireling and the slave.” And then, after doing more research, Hunter recalls, “I just wasn’t into it at all.”

In the end, he agreed to perform an instrumental version, but before picking up his fiddle he spent five-plus minutes educating the crowd on the anthem’s history. “The fact that the melody is actually an old British fraternity song,” Hunter told me. “I mean, right there that tells you how ass-backward our thoughts are on what this anthem means. And then I kind of played it in a minor key. I played it much more rubato and recitative—I didn’t hold the melody exactly, and I made it more bluesy.” His intent “was for everybody to actually reconsider if this song represented what it was to be American.” (“What he did,” Liu says, “was very moving.”)