Maryland's State Song Trivia Quiz

Answer:

I seem to say this every time, but ... if you thought any of the other state songs were messy, brace yourself, because "Maryland, My Maryland" completely snaps the scale. Not just snaps it, but crushes it, melts it down, and casts bullets from it to come out shooting at you.

The lyrics have been called America's "most martial poem", which is a fancy way of saying it is an incredibly violent, angry battle cry. Written in 1861 by a Confederate-sympathizing journalist, James Ryder Randall, the song was a direct, furious reaction to a bloody Civil War riot in Baltimore. Randall was mildly annoyed that his friend was killed in the chaos. So mildly, in fact, that he sat down and penned a massive, nine-stanza rage-poem to convince Maryland to secede from the United States and join the South.

Randall doesn't hold back. Right out of the gate, the very first line screams "The despot's heel is on thy shore!" The "despot" and later the "tyrant" he is screaming about? None other than President Abraham Lincoln. Randall did not stop there. He openly refers to Union soldiers as "Northern scum" and begs the state to avenge the "patriotic gore" spilled in the streets which included, let me remind you, the blood of his friend.

In a truly wild twist, this aggressive, anti-Lincoln war anthem was set to the melody of "O Tannenbaum". This means Confederate troops were marching into battle shouting about killing Union soldiers to the festive, cheerful tune of "O Christmas Tree". You only want the North to have been returning the favour by screaming they were "A-Gonna kill Johnny Reb" to the tune of "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer".

Despite the song being a giant love letter to the Confederacy, the state of Maryland "somehow" officially adopted it as their state anthem in 1939 during the Jim Crow era. For decades, people pointed out how bizarre it was to have an official song that directly insults the United States government and praises its enemies. After more than ten separate failed attempts over forty years to fix the issue (including many attempts to just vote in a new song) the state finally had enough. In 2021, the governor signed a bill that officially repealed the song entirely, leaving Maryland with no official state song at all. The song was finally deemed to be so intensely toxic that the government decided having absolute silence was vastly better than singing it...And yeah, but seriously...it took them until 2021 to figure out that singing about burning the Northern Scum was no bueno in a national anthem? Way to be ahead of the curve there Old Liners.